Award-winning industrial designer Hugo Kogan, renowned for creating household objects such as the iconic Magiclick, has died at the age of 89. His influence on design extended internationally with the creation of dozens of objects of all kinds for the home.
Born on June 12, 1934 in Buenos Aires, over more than 50 years of experience he created small and large appliances, electronic equipment, industrial and family textile machines, among other objects.
Throughout his life, he received three times the Diploma of Merit of the Konex Awards as one of the best industrial designers of the decade on each occasion.
"With sadness we say goodbye to the designer Hugo Kogan (1934-2023), who dedicated his life to hierarchizing the national industry: he designed televisions, radios, flashlights, medical equipment and even invented the iconic Magiclick, ally of homes and emblem of our affective heritage," the Malba Museum dismissed him.
The National Endowment for the Arts also echoed the news: "We say goodbye with deep regret to Hugo Kogan, a very outstanding and much-loved reference of Argentine Design and FNA Trajectory Award 2018".
He always liked sculpture and drawing, and by a fortuitous event, the bankruptcy of his father's wooden toy factory, he changed art for architecture.
He attended two years and then became a mechanical technician. That's where their knowledge of materials and processes and technologies comes from.
He formed the design departments of companies such as Philips Argentina, Tonomac and Aurora.
As Clarín reviewed in a note on the occasion of having been awarded by the National Academy of Fine Arts, already in 1955 he worked in the design office of Philips. From there he went to Tonomac and from there to Aurora Grundig, for whom he created the famous Magiclick in 1963. According to a market study, the first month they were going to sell five thousand units, but the boom was such that they received orders for 80 thousand.
In a 2008 interview, Kogan confessed that one of the great joys of his life was learning that what he did had a name. And it still happens to him, he doesn't know where to start every time he tries to explain to someone what his thing is about: "I would need six or seven hours," he laughs.
The success was so great that the company opened plants in Brazil and Spain. Although in the story he told years ago in a report he says he regrets not having signed a contract for royalties, he recognizes that it was the owner of Aurora who arrived from Japan "with an unprecedented artifact for us, the piezoelectric, a piece that if one pressed on one end fired a spark. Playing with it, the idea of making it as a manual artifact, of popular use, appeared. I designed it, it was developed.