In Memoriam: Joe Ricchio, Chair Designer Extraordinaire
Joe Ricchio, founder and principal of Ricchio Design has died after a short illness at the age of 68, in hospital with his family at his bedside.
Joe was a prolific designer of chairs for many of the industry’s leading companies, with perhaps his most famous being the Ricchio Chair designed with his wife Linda, for Knoll in the late 80’s and launched by Knoll in 1990. Carl Magnusson, Design Director of Knoll at the time said, “Joe was a superb designer, partially as he had an innate sense of the market, which immediately propelled the Ricchio Chair into a Knoll best seller. In his kindness, he took his fame and success and returned it as mentor to the next generation.”
He taught furniture design at California State University, Long Beach for more than 15 years and worked hard to introduce his students to the world of Design, through trips to NeoCon and Salone del Mobile, Milan. The trips to Salone with 10 to 12 students included a week in Cortona, where he held design charettes and Renaissance design and culture trips to Florence, Siena and the surrounding Tuscan countryside.
Eric MacDonald, a former student and participant in some of the trips to Salone and NeoCon said, “He was my furniture design professor for two years. He took me under his design wing and helped me launch my career. He gave me a love for design (and chairs) that reached far beyond the walls of CSULB. His influence, his heart, and his compassion were unmatched by any other professor I had in my many years of education. I do my best to remember the best parts of him, and live on in his legacy, every day.”
His education was industrial design and over the years he designed any number of “industrial” products in the tech industry, such as copiers and printers for companies such as Epson, but he was really most passionate about designing chairs and long after CAD took over as the dominant drafting method, he stuck to drafting full-size chair drawings, because that method gave him a more intimate relationship to the design.
Leaders of some of the companies he worked with remembered Joe as a talented designer and perhaps even more as a talented human being. A dinner with Joe was always a memorable experience.
He is missed and will long be remembered.
