Giotto Stoppino
A successful project
A designer of undisputed calibre, he created a single family of products for Rossi di Albizzate, which became part of the Italian Design Museum - Triennale Milano.
By then at the peak of the company's expansion, the newly established shareholding company Rossi di Albizzate, on the strength of sales that had more than doubled in just two years, decided to expand its product range and rely on the multi-award-winning former Compasso d'Oro '79 and former ADI President from '82 to '84, Giotto Stoppino.
The project was born in '87 under the name of EBLA, a set of five elements composed of an armchair, sofa and dining tables. A synthetic and warm product with a very innovative structural and compositional solution that encapsulates Giotto Stoppino's poetics in a modernised form. The legs become a seamless seat while the armrests unusually embrace the seat to which they are anchored and in turn act as anchors for the backrest, which appears suspended on the two armrests. Underlining the design value of the armrest element, not surprisingly made of curved tubular metal, is the different material and colour treatment.
These characteristics have led the Ebla armchair to be part of the permanent collection of the Italian Design Museum, Triennale-Milan. Ebla joins eight other products in the Museum signed by Giotto Stoppino.
Graduated in '51, he immediately embraced the Neo-Art Noveau current born as an oppositional reaction to rationalism. Very active culturally, in '54 he was already present at the Triennale where he exhibited in six consecutive editions, and in '60 he was already a member of ADI. He was among the experimenters of the first plastic materials with Kartell, for which in '72 he exhibited in the "Italy: the new domestic landscape""Italy: the new domestic landscape", a product now part of the permanent collection of MoMa NYC and still in production.
His formal experiments with bent metal tubing, clearly Bauhaus-derived but contaminated by Neo-Art Noveau poetics, which can also be read in the Ebla armchair, became guidelines for the entire 1960s production.
Giotto Stoppino's fame and successes did not stop at Ebla in '87, but continued until he was awarded the second Compasso d'Oro in '91 and the Compasso d'Oro alla Carriera in 2011, the year in which Giotto Stoppino stopped his design activity for good, leaving behind a remarkable cultural contribution to the world of Italian design and a pleasant memory of a fruitful collaboration at Rossi di Albizzate.
https://www.adi-design.org/xxii-compasso-d-oro-premi-alla-carriera.html