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Bruno Munari, the designer who believed in the perfect shape of the egg, "even if it is made with the ass"

2022-08-02T16:55:46.169Z


In this first installment of August on singular creators, we begin with what for many has been the best designer of all time, who left a work that was more artistic than industrial


During this month of heat and, hopefully, rest, we are going to get into the worlds of unique creators who rethought design, the garden, the interior space, the public and the way of seeing.

We start with a magician: Bruno Munari (1907-1997).

For many the best designer of all time, Munari left a work more artistic than industrial.

More ingenious than calculated, more about ideas than objects.

I summarize the personified geometry of the great Italian designer.

He spent his life wondering.

And surprising us.

He wrote that the egg has a perfect shape.

Despite being done with the ass.

But he wasn't just a witty prankster.

He was convinced that it was necessary for the artist to come down from his pedestal and deign to design a butcher's sign (if he knew how to do it).

He, a full-fledged artist, considered it urgent that creators be active among the rest of human beings: “The designer today reestablishes the contact, lost for a long time, between art and the public, between art and the public that vibrates

It is no longer about the picture for the living room, but about the appliance for the kitchen.

There should be no separate art from life: pretty things to look at and ugly things to wear."

More information

Bruno Munari, pioneer of industrial design, dies at 90

In this first installment on August readings and on the wise Munari, we are going to approach his simple geometry.

Who was made to think of the square, the circle and the triangle: "High and wide like a person with open arms, the square appears in the oldest writings and in the cave incisions of the first human beings to signify the idea of enclosure, house or village.

It is enigmatic in its simplicity, in the monotonous repetition of four equal sides, of four equal angles, it generates a group of harmonic rectangles, the golden section and the logarithmic spiral that is also found in nature in the organic growth of many forms of life. ”.

Munari understood that with its structural possibilities, the square had helped artists and architects of all times and styles to establish a harmonic structure on which to gel artistic construction.

He recognized that it is present in all the styles of all peoples and of all times as a structural element and as a load-bearing and determining surface of a particular decoration”.

However, as Munari took all the juice out of everything he dedicated himself to observing, he also wrote what it was not from the square.

Or what a moving square is: static, if it rests on one side, and dynamic if it rests on an angle.

He warned that it is magical if it contains numbers and that it can be diabolical when such numbers are squared or cubed in relation to each other.

He also explained that it is in nature.

The square?

Yes, in many minerals.

Munari, who came to design machines to wag the tail of dogs, always urged us to learn to see what we have in front of us: “What color is white wine?

Is yellow.

And the red wine?

It's red.

If you ask the waiter for a glass of yellow wine, he will look at you with pity”.

Multifaceted, when he was reproached for having too broad an interest, he replied that “Leonardo's machines do not correspond to the style of

La Gioconda

”.

And assuming that "the painting is already a portable form of what was previously the mural painting", he devised the

Traveling Sculptures

that he took on a trip and displayed on the hotel table.

Portable sculptures by Bruno Munari. Fundación March

If he considered that the square is linked to the human being and his constructions, to architecture, to harmonic structures and to writing, he associated the circle with the divine.

“A circle has represented and still represents eternity, since it has no beginning or end.

An ancient text says that God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

An essentially unstable and dynamic figure, he pointed out that "all the turns or rotary schemes are born from the circle, and also the vain searches for perpetual motion."

Thus, “even though it is the simplest of curves, mathematicians consider it to be a polygon with an infinite number of sides.

A point marked on the circumference of a circle breaks the idea of ​​eternity and marks an end to the circumference itself.

In nature we easily find the circle: “It is enough to throw a stone into calm water.

The sphere is born, spontaneously, in the soap bubbles.

A tree trunk section shows growth rings.

Regarding art, he summed up that a circle drawn by hand proved Giotto's skill.

And he added that among the first figures that a child begins to draw, the circle is always found.

Also that in a space, people spontaneously stand in a circle when they have to observe something nearby, thus recreating the shape of the stage.

Or the circus.

Munari spoke of design from the imagination and imagination from a logic: “A disc, supported on a plane, cannot be disordered;

That is why the plates are almost always round: it is easier to arrange them on the table.

If they were hexagonal, square, octagonal or rectangular, the order problems at the table would complicate their arrangement for food”.

Creators of signature-fusion cuisine, take note: it is one thing to innovate on the plate and another with the plate.

If not the same.

He also wondered about us, about people: “Why have we become almost gods as technologists and almost demons as moral beings, supermen in science and idiots in aesthetics;

idiots, especially, according to the Greek meaning of absolutely isolated individuals, incapable of communicating and understanding each other? ”, he asked himself in the eighties.

Munari, portrayed in an exhibition about his work. March Foundation

Finally, about the equilateral triangle he wrote that it is the one often found in the plant world, where three generating points establish a balance of forces to create a shape.

“In the plant world we find pentagons, but the equilateral triangle seems to be the symbol of structural balance.

Even though it is made of a very brittle material, a tetrahedron is very robust, solid and does not deform.

Many metallic structures are built from the accumulation of triangles and tetrahedrons.

The equilateral triangle is found in nature in certain minerals, such as fluorite or tourmaline.

As everyone knows, snow crystals have a hexagonal structure;

that is, of six grouped triangles;

Wilson Bentley has photographed about 30,000, all of them different.

Richard Buckminster Fuller's famous structures are based on equilateral triangles.

The triangle is very present in the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.

More than in the Egyptian pyramids, on the other hand, which were not built with perfectly equilateral triangles.

Munari was convinced that complicating is much easier than simplifying;

it is enough to add everything that comes to mind without worrying about whether the costs will exceed the sales limits or if it takes more time to make the object.

Simplifying means trying to solve the problem by removing everything that doesn't work for the functions.

Simplifying is also reducing costs, reducing work, assembly and finishing time.

It means solving two problems at the same time with a single solution.

Simplifying is hard work and requires a lot of creativity.

She had.

Munari's fragments that make up this text are taken from one of his unforgettable essays:

Art as a trade

.

All his writings on his design are translated into Spanish by the Gustavo Gili publishing house.

Fantasy

or

How objects are born

transmit knowledge, fun and a very broad way of understanding the world.

Source: elparis

All life articles on 2022-08-02

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