An Interview with Rodolfo Dordoni

Readers of officeinsight are well aware of my recent trip to Milan for the SuperSalone 2021 edition of Salone del Mobile.Milano. (see officeinsight 09/20/2021). While there I had an opportunity to interview Rodolfo Dordoni. His work is well-known and widely admired in Europe, but less so here. So I was thrilled to have the opportunity to meet him on a personal level and introduce him to our subscribers.

Dordoni was born and raised in Milan. He studied at the prestigious Accademia di Brera and received his degree in architecture from the Milan Polytechnic – the former being one of the foremost art schools in Italy and the latter being the foremost architecture, and engineering school.

He founded Dordoni Architetti in 2005 as a combination architecture and product design studio.  On the architecture side he designs private villas and apartments, shops, exhibition spaces, restaurants and hotels. On the product design side his work spans many typologies from lighting to accessories to architectural hardware, but he’s best known for furniture.  He also does art direction and strategy consulting for some of his clients. I don’t want to preempt the interview here, but his design style is notable for its sophisticated sensitivity, balance and sobriety. In 2011 he received the Premio Nazionale per l’Innovazione, and in 2014 he was awarded an Honorable Mention in the XXIII Compasso d’Oro.

Without further-adieu, here’s my interview.

How and why did you become an architect?

Rodolfo Dordoni: It was what I wanted to do. When I was 13 years old my parents tried to subscribe me to a scientific school. I said, ‘I don’t want to do that, I want to go to an art school. I want to go to the Accademia and after that I want to draw.’ And my mother said, ‘Your vocational level is too low and they didn’t accept you, because you are too stupid.’ (Note: students in Italy earned “vocational levels” between zero and ten. It’s similar to GPA in America)

You needed a level of seven or eight to get into the Accademia and I had only six. So I said if I can’t go to the Accademia I’m going to quit school and go to work. So my mother found a private art school I could go to and I went there for one year and the next year I went to Accademia. That year at the private art school was my most successful year at school. I worked very hard because it was in my mind that I had to do well so I could go to Accademia.”

While I was at Accademia, I realized that I was not a conceptual artist, I liked to draw and I wanted to create something, but I didn’t want to make a mistake with my career and so I decided to study architecture.

How do you think your background at Accademia informs your design approach now?

I think it’s a mixture – a balance between background and attitude. My attitude is like me, I’m square. I’m a Virgo, so very rational, very straight or linear (he makes a straight-ahead gesture). My attitude gives me a certain point of view, I want to see in a straight direction, I want to be sure, I want to be clear, I want to be obsessive, even maniacal and I think my work reflects my attitude.

When did you start your own firm? Did you work for somebody else for a time or start on your own right out of school?

I never worked for another architectural firm, but I was lucky. For sure I was very lucky. I spent my university time working in a group with Giulio Cappellini. We worked together in our group for five years and we took our degrees together. And after that we decided to work together at his own company. It was a family company but it was producing traditional furniture. At that time I didn’t really know what design was even though I went to the Salone del Mobile while we were at university – because Giulio would show me his pieces at the fair, but we never talked about it, and I never went deeper into thinking about design. And at that time the university had no courses on design or the theory of design or anything about product design – nothing.

The only way to learn about it was to work in a factory or a studio.  At the end of university we decided to work together at Cappellini. I worked there for ten years doing art direction. It was Giulio and me. We did everything. It was interesting to me because I touched every level and typology of work on the product, because it’s not just design, it’s production and costing and selling and the whole process and that’s why I consider myself lucky, because I understood the whole process from working in every level. I got to see parts of the story that are not easy to see in any other way.

Tell me about your firm now. I believe you do both architecture and product design.  On the architecture side do you do interiors as well?

When I started my own firm, my name was more known in that part of the work – not on the architecture side but in the design part of the business. So when people started coming to me asking me to do a flat or a restaurant it was people who assumed that I would not just do the structure, but would do the interiors as well because they knew my style and my taste. Now when we do an architecture project it’s a complete 360-degree project.

I’m here in your studio and I see that it’s physically divided into two parts. Tell me about the layout.

You see the wall there in the middle, beyond that wall is the end of the ancient studio, where Design and Architecture were working together. The architecture department has a different method of work than the Design department and having them all together was becoming very complicated, so I decided to move the Design department here when this space became available. So we started the renovation on this side at the beginning of the year and when we were finished, in August, we opened the wall. Now the other side is Architecture and this side is Design.

I stay here on this side, because design is my main profession and I’m more comfortable working on design. For me architecture is more complicated and stressful and I don’t want to be stressed.

Who runs the Architecture side?

I have a partner, Luca Zaniboni, who was one of my first assistants when I opened the firm. We made a partnership ten years ago and he is managing that side. We meet to discuss the projects and plan together and so on, but he is managing the day-to-day architecture business.

 

What is your typical work process with a product design client?

I work with a pencil. I draw or sketch – I can’t do it on a computer. Then I discuss the ideas with my staff. I give them the sketches and they create 3D computer models using Lightwave. We work on the models, changing and refining them until I’m happy with them and then we take them to the client for engineering.

At that point the client develops a prototype and they give it back to us. We work on the prototype making changes and refinements and give it back to the company. This process goes back and forth until we get the final product.

How do you think about innovation in design?

 Sometimes we use the term innovation in the wrong way or we abuse it somehow. I think innovation is to try to create a new suggestion of what a chair or a table or a lamp can be. We try to share what we feel in terms of taste, what we feel in terms of beauty – innovation is not just to find a new solution or another product but a new interpretation, another suggestion.

You’ve achieved great success in your career so far, what’s next for you?

I don’t know why, maybe it’s my age but I am moving myself in another direction – let’s say to see the same thing but from another direction. I would like to confirm to myself that I’m able to do it. I’m not talking about this in terms of product but in terms of mentality, in terms of concept.

I would like to do lighter, less expensive, more economical products. I’d like to be less bourgeois – more casual. It’s difficult because people read my taste as bourgeois, but I’m not bourgeois, so I want to prove to myself that I can design more casual products, but it’s partly about finding the right company, with some companies it would be impossible.