The valley in Italian Alps, Lake Orta, has a long tradition of wood and metal handicraft. It's the birthplace of Alessi, one of those small companies with a typical spirit of Italian design.
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Within the Alessi company, design in the current sense of the term began to gain a foothold under Carlo Alessi, who drew on his training as an industrial designer in order to develop virtually all of the products which appeared in catalogues between 1935 and 1945.
In the 1950s, Carlo Alessi replaced my his father as corporate general manager, giving up altogether his activity as a designer and increasingly relying on the contributions of freelance designers, in accordance with a practice which was to become typical of all "Italian Design Factories".
To this day, Alessi products are still considered as being handicraft items made with the aid of machines: by this we mean that, even though Alessi rely on contemporary, industrial technology and processing equipment, the company's roots are still in a handicraft culture.
When speaking about the "Italian Design factories" we are referring to a historical group of companies for whom design is a mission, an activity which has gradually broken away from its original meaning as a simple formal project for an object and has become a sort of "overall philosophy". Alessi believes that its true nature comes closer to a "Research Lab in the Applied Arts" than to an industry in the traditional sense of the term.
Alessi's industrial research laboratory in the field of design, inheriting from great movements of the past such as the British Arts & Crafts, the Austrian Wiener Werkstaette and the German Bauhaus. These collaborations have brought together poetry, creativity, culture, vision, sincerity, modernity and design excellence like no other.
Alessi offers its skills in design management and vision of design as an overall creative discipline to companies working with products that are far removed from its line of products. These companies are highly specialised in their technological and distribution fields that could create truly new items conceived for the evolved public of the twenty-first century. ■