Donato D Urbino
Milan, 1935
De Pas, D Urbino and Lomazzi set up their own studio in 1966 in Milan, where they undertook urban and architecture projects and industrial designs. In it they started their peculiar venture with PVC inflatable and modular furniture like the Blow armchair (1967) -the first inflatable piece of furniture of mass-production, an icon of pop culture-, or the Joe armchair (1970), shaped as a baseball glove in the honor of the legendary baseball player Joe DiMaggio. "We were young, full of life, and we wanted to break with the bourgeoisie tradition", said Paolo Lomazzi when talking about their...
De Pas, D Urbino and Lomazzi set up their own studio in 1966 in Milan, where they undertook urban and architecture projects and industrial designs. In it they started their peculiar venture with PVC inflatable and modular furniture like the Blow armchair (1967) -the first inflatable piece of furniture of mass-production, an icon of pop culture-, or the Joe armchair (1970), shaped as a baseball glove in the honor of the legendary baseball player Joe DiMaggio. "We were young, full of life, and we wanted to break with the bourgeoisie tradition", said Paolo Lomazzi when talking about their beginnings.
During the 70s the studio participated in the designin project of the Italian pavilion for the World Fair in Osaka, and in the exhibition "Italy: The New Domestic Landscape" in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972. They were awarded in 1979 the Compasso D´Oro prize in the Milan Triennial for their for their coat stand «Sciangai», an object they redesigned afterwards adding a sort of wavy hair to it, thus being called Parruca (edited by Santa & Cole). In that decade they created several flexible and exchangeable seats such as the Flap or the Jointed, warehousing systems as the Biblio-Tech shelf, or plastic and plywood elements and other complements.
In 1983, they were authors of a film produced from the Italian National Television (RAI TV) on the history of Italian Design in the last thirty years called "Dal cucchiaio alla città: il design italiano dal 1950 al 1980" ("From the spoon to the city - Italian design from 1950 to 1980", making a clear reference to the famous Bauhaus motto). Today they continue, without De Pas (who died in 1991), their unstoppable activity in the fields of architecture, design, exhibitions, interior design and urban planning. "We want to create nice, happy and useful objects" says Lomazzi when describing the studio's philosophy.
