Lorenzo Palmeri

Giorgio Bonaguro is an Italian artist and designer, who studied mechanical engineering in Modena and then graduated at Scuola Politecnica di Design SPD, in Milan, with the double Master’s degree of industrial and interior design. He has worked in several design studios in Milan, first at Lorenzo Palmeri's, then with Francesco Faccin, at Michele De Lucchi's Studio. And then, with the designer and critic, Marco Romanelli. Giorgio has collaborated with several companies and developed limited editions, presented at some international fairs, such as “Salone del Mobile," “Design Miami,” “London Design Festival," “Wanted Design NY," “Maison et Objet” and “Design Days Dubai." He works between Italy and Brazil, in the field of product design, interior design, exhibition and lighting, trying to combine a linear style with research and contamination between materials.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.