MARCELLO NIZZOLI
Germano Celant

Germano Celant: MARCELLO NIZZOLI. Milano: Edizioni di Comunita, 1968. First edition. A very good hardcover book in a very good dust jacket that is lightly chipped and worn. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print.

9.25 x 10.5 hardcover book with 226 pages and 273 color and b/w illustrations of Nizzoli's modern industrial design, architecture and graphic design. Introduction by Gillo Dorfles. This volume is the first monograph on Nizzoli and it is a lavish production -- designed and produced to the highest standards ofthe Milan publishing world.

Italian industrial designer Marcello Nizzoli (1887­1969) remains best known for his innovative design of office machines for the Olivetti company, as well as his magnificent poster work for Campari and the Italian automobile and motorcycle industries.

Nizzoli revolutionized the formal language of the "machine" with the Olivetti Lexikon 80 model in 1946. With the introduction of die-casted aluminium bodies it became possible to produce a typewriter with a continuous form; this made an "organic" style, in Italian design and in Nizzoli's work, feasible.

Before World War Two, Nizzoli had provided abundant proof of his ability as an artist and architect: in abstract paintings, advertising designs for Campari, interior decoration for the VI Milan Triennial and the Exhibition of Aeronautics (in collaboration with Edoardo Persico) and other shops. After the death of Persico he was invited to work at the technical office of advertising of Olivetti at Ivrea by Leonardo Sinisgalli; he first worked as a commercial artist and then, since 1940, as a designer. It was with Olivetti that he was to make a decisive contribution to the development of industrial design: in his articles for the magazine "Stile Industria" he describes the designer who must, in his collaboration with the factory, be able to discuss the possibilities of modifying the object in order to improve its form. In the following years he realized some of the most famous Olivetti projects, such as the typewriters Lexikon 80 (1946-1948), Lettera 22 (1950), Diaspron (1959) and the calculating machine Divisumma 24.

out of stock