Livio Castiglioni (16 January 1911 – 30 April 1979) was an Italian architect and designer. He made a significant contribution to twentieth-century Italian lighting design and was an early proponent of the practice of industrial design in Italy.[1][2][3]
He received a degree in architecture from the Polytechnic University of Milan in 1936, and subsequently went into practice with his brother Pier Giacomo and Luigi Caccia Dominioni. After the Second World War the youngest Castiglioni brother, Achille, joined their architecture and design studio; in the mid-1950s Livio left to establish his own design practice.[4]
Much of the early work of the Castiglioni brothers was in exhibition design, although they also carried out a number of architectural projects, including the reconstruction in 1952–1953 of the Palazzo della Permanente [it] in Milan, which had been destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943.[7]
Livio Castiglioni designed products for companies such as Alessi, Artemide, FontanaArte [it], and Stilnovo [it].[8][9][10][11] One of his first works of industrial design was the 1939 "F.I.M.I. – Phonola [it] 547" tabletop radio, which is amongst the earliest examples of this product typology to challenge traditional shapes and aesthetics, making it a turning point in the history of Italian industrial design.[12][13] He was a consultant to Phonola until 1956, and then for Brionvega from 1960 to 1964.[10]
In 1969–1970 he and Gianfranco Frattini designed the "Boalum" light for Artemide (the name combines "Boa" and "lum" from "lume", an Italian word for light). The design was still in production in 2023, over fifty years after it was first manufactured.[14][15][16][17]
Reflecting on his friendship with the Castiglionis, the designer Massimo Vignelli said:
In reality, the Castiglioni brothers were one person. Symbiosis of thought, creative ability, inspiration and execution were an integral part of their being. Talking to one of them or all three of them was the same, they were completely interchangeable, same voice, same accent, same grin, same laughter, same gestures. They were the Castiglioni, like their work, indivisible fruit of the same research, of the same passion, of a great ability to transform the world around us into a new memorable gesture.[28]
In 2014 the city of Milan named a street Via Fratelli Castiglioni in honour of the three Castiglioni brothers.[29][30]
^Vignelli, Massimo. "Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, ovvero il coraggio della modestia". Professore Architetto Pier Giacomo Castiglioni (in Italian). Archived from the original on 23 June 2021. Retrieved 23 February 2023. In realtà i fratelli Castiglioni erano una sola persona. La simbiosi di pensiero, la capacità creativa, l'ispirazione e l'esecuzione erano parte integrante del loro essere. Parlare con uno di loro o con tutti e tre di loro era lo stesso, erano completamente intercambiabili, stessa voce, stesso accento, stesso ghigno, stessa risata, stessi gesti. Erano i Castiglioni, come il loro lavoro, frutto indivisibile di una stessa ricerca, di una stessa passione, di una grande abilità a trasformare il mondo che ci sta intorno in un nuovo memorabile gesto.
