Moulded plastic 'Vicario' armchair, designed by Vico Magistretti in 1971 and manufactured by Artemide

Armchair, compression-moulded as a single-piece of fibreglass-reinforced polyester. The Vicario is one of two moulded plastic armchairs that Magistretti designed in 1971 - the other, the Gaudi chair, is taller and narrower but with the same basic leg and arm design. Both the Vicario and the Gaudi are related to Magistretti's first moulded plastic chair - the Selene, designed for Artemide in 1969 (see Circ.280-1970 and Circ.504:A to D-1973). In all three chairs, Magistretti moulded the legs into an innovative 'S' contour, a shape that offers high levels of material stability across the moulded sheet of plastic.

Given by the Art History Department, University of Sussex

This is one of a pair of Vicario chairs that were bought in the 1970s by the Art History Department at the University of Sussex, for use in the slide library.

Born in Milan in 1920, Vico Magistretti studied architecture at the Milan Polytechnic Institute before starting work in his father’s practice in 1945. Magistretti worked as an architect until the late 1980s. Alongside this he had an extremely productive career as a furniture and product designer – starting in 1946, when he first showed his furniture at the Milan Triennale. Magistretti was one of the founders (in 1956) of the Association for Industrial Design. He had long working relationships with leading Italian manufacturers, such as Cassina and Artemide. Of the more than 120 furniture and product designs that Magistretti produced over his career, over three-quarters were still being manufactured at the time of his death in 2006. Alongside his practice as a designer and architect, Magistretti was a visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art between 1980 and 2000. Here he had a significant influence on a generation of British furniture designers, teaching Jasper Morrison and Konstantin Grcic, among others.

Vico Magistretti was one of a number of furniture designers experimenting with moulded plastic chairs in the late 1960s. The first successful single-piece plastic chairs were manufactured in the mid-1960s (for example, the ‘Bofinger’ stacking chair, see CIRC.435, 437, 438, 439-1970). Magistretti, like his contemporaries, was interested in plastic as a new material that would allow for the cheap, quick mass- production of well-designed furniture. The smooth, unornamented forms of moulded plastic were highly sympathetic to Magistretti’s minimalist style, while the factory-based means of production fitted his ideal of good, affordable design for all.

W.1-2014