Platform_Architecture_and_Design_1.pdf

74 BACKSTAGE
Davide Groppi is the name of a company, a
designer, a person who won two Compassi
d’Oro during the Award’s last edition.
Two of his productions were declared
to be excellent: “Nulla” and “Sampei”.
Given the large number of companies
within the lighting sector of the Italian
design panorama and the competitivity
that typifies them, how did this happen?
Davide Groppi wasn’t expecting it and
so when the news reached him it must
have been a tremendous feeling. This
result was the external recognition of a
great body of work that comes from the
distant past, as well as a contribution
to commercial growth, which is not
surprisingly very important this year.
But when did his story begin?
51 years ago in Piacenza, but he doesn’t
really show his age, perhaps because
he maintains a healthy lifestyle and
surrounds himself with beauty, but in
actual fact some years later, when as
a child together with his electrician
father, he discovered the pleasure of
making his first creations (a pinball
machine, a telegraph) and going on to
eventually master technology as a tool
for expressing innovation. Turning on
a new light is like re-living once again
those early emotions. What interests
him is talking to people through light.
“A lamp exists to make people feel
close” he says. His language combines
technology and poetry; two components
that could be considered far apart;
humanism and industrial production as
necessary ingredients in design.
As in all the best stories, success did not
arrive overnight, but rather as the result
of a journey, made up of consecutive
stages and constant hard work. He
opened his first workshop at 22 (and
his business began in 1985) then 1994
was his coming of age when Maddalena
De Padova put one of his lamps in her
own store, ordered forty or so more
and christened him a designer. There
followed a partnership with Roberto
Gavazzi of Boffi and the large scale sale
of products like “Ozen” and “Toast”
which led him to organize production.
So it’s difficult to understand where he
stops being a designer and starts being a
businessman. He was at the start of what
we today call “self-production” so as to
best create a personal identity; as points
of reference he cites Ingo Maurer among
others for his way of creating lamps with
poetry, and the technical production of
companies like Kreon. Davide Groppi is
passionate about what he does and he
does it well; he designs lights, produces
them and then distributes them, he
talks about them, he suggests them to
his partners, clients; it is not by chance
that he produces them for numerous
restaurants and their chefs such as
Moreno Cedroni, Massimo Bottura,
Massimiliano Alaimo, Giancarlo
Perbellini (the “Tetatet” lamp answers
the need for an independent table lamp).
He lights up spaces by thinking about
the light he wants to obtain and the
relationship between the people that he
wants to illuminate, he reduces the lamp
to a “Nothing” to make us appreciate
just the light ( thinking long and hard
about the size in millimetres that this
opening – a white hole – should have
even when turned off) or with “N-euro”
he draws the outline of a wire on a wall
that reaches a faraway socket, turning it
into a decorative wall feature in order to
resolve a problem.
Decorative and technical lighting, there
are no limits or types to answer to; what
is important is searching for the best
light, female at times, (diffused) and
male at others (precise) depending on
the need, to give depth to spaces. The
theme of magic, amazement, simplicity
and lightness are constant together with
the search for technology at the heart of
design. With “Sampei” he has managed
to create an overhead lamp even in the
absence of a ceiling and the lamp makes
us feel we are under a star-filled sky, at
home in the universe.
Even his warehouse, where he walks
around at ease, is a poetic machine,
surprisingly tidy; it expresses the
attention to detail behind the process,
not just the end product.
The show-room lets his lamps speak:
they don’t need explanations because
their words are clear, in harmony with
what is created. There is a sense of irony,
his lamps express joy and knowing
that they exist is like getting a present,
perhaps because they were created to be
a gift to the world.
This is the heart of creativity: sharing
the beauty of the world and enlarging
it... if possible.
He manages to do it very well.