Giancarlo Piretti has left us this January, on the 18th.
With him goes a particular kind of silence, the silence of work that never needed to announce itself.

Design today increasingly defines itself through declaration and manifesto, through carefully curated image. Piretti offered something rarer: the eloquence of precision. His designs didn't
speak; they held, they folded, they endured.
That restraint contained a kind of poetry the design world claims to seek but rarely allows itself to practice.

For those who studied Industrial Design in Bologna like me, or were just fellow citizen, Piretti existed in a particular way: as a presence, a symbol, someone reachable yet belonging to a
different time.
He was there in the city, still working, still carrying the same quiet logic that shaped the iconic Plia in 1967.

Plia is a landmark of industrial design, defined by lightness, versatility and
technical precision. Its die-cast aluminium joint allows the chair to fold to a
thickness of approximately five centimetres; produced in over seven million
units, it is part of the permanent design collection of the MoMA, New York.
Image from © 2026 Anonima Castelli - All right reserved

Born in Bologna in 1940 and trained at the Istituto Statale d'Arte and the Accademia di Belle Arti, Piretti built his practice almost entirely within the rhythm of industrial production. His long collaboration with Anonima Castelli during the 1960s and '70s placed him at the center of a rare moment when Italian design was discovering how to speak through objects that existed at scale, in real spaces, answering real needs.
What distinguished Piretti from many of his generation was that his projects shared an internal logic, a commitment to reduction, a respect for how things are made and why they endure.

Piretti sketches: Plia chair

Bologna held a unique position in Italian design culture.
While Florence birthed the Radical Design movement with its provocative manifestos, anti-design rhetoric, and utopian speculations from Archizoom and Superstudio, Bologna maintained a different character.
The city had its own kind of subversion, embodied by figures like Dino Gavina, the entrepreneur who commissioned Carlo Scarpa to design his showroom on Via Altabella 23, Bologna, and founded companies like Gavina SpA and Flos, this last together with Cesare Cassina.

The Gavina store in Bologna, designed by Carlo Scarpa, 1960.

But Bologna's design culture was equally shaped by its industrial core, by manufacturers who understood materials and machinery, by workshops producing components for furniture makers across Northern Italy. The city's design education balanced between expressive rebellion and rigorous engineering discipline.

Dino Gavina, Achille Castiglioni, Pier Giacomo
Castiglioni and Michele Provinciali photographed
beside the Sanluca armchair under the Portico
of San Luca, Bologna, 1960. © Mauro Masera.

I had the privilege of working under Giancarlo Piretti’s guidance, with one of my closest friends Caterina, on an actual product, a sofa-bed project we developed during our studies, called “Parallelo”. Not an academic exercise or a concept for tomorrow, but an object meant to exist, to be manufactured, to be used.

I remember the first time we entered Piretti's house. He asked us to guess a particular object displayed like a sculpture in the hall: it was an industrial pasta propeller, a gift from Dino Gavina. To Piretti, it was simultaneously a piece of art, a piece of history, a piece of design.

Piretti various designs

Piretti embodied that synthesis.
During the internship, before we even began sketching, Piretti insisted we visit the factories and workshops. We collected samples, took notes, asked questions directly to the people who would actually make the thing. This wasn't optional context; it was the foundation.
“You cannot design what you don't understand how to build”, he kept saying.

The project emerged from those visits. We chose the sofa-bed precisely because it seemed unsolved, a hybrid object trapped between two functions, never quite succeeding at either.
Piretti approved the challenge but made clear what mattered: essential processing and economical solutions, few elements and common materials like bent or welded tubing, monomaterial structure where possible, formal clarity and lightness, intuitive mechanisms,
comfort, contained costs.

Technical drawings of the Parallelo sofa, with sketches reviewed
by Giancarlo Piretti, 2017

Design sketches laid out on the floor; author
observed from above.

That experience didn't just teach me the design matter; it taught me what design could be when stripped of everything but intention and consequence.
Does the mechanism function? Can it be produced? Will the structure endure? There was no room for narrative. The object had to justify itself through its own integrity.
This wasn't pedagogy. It was the transmission of a discipline.

Piretti sketches: Plia chair

This is why Plia, designed in 1967 and produced from 1969, remains his most recognized work without ever behaving like an icon.
Plia doesn't perform. It doesn't announce itself. It addresses a problem: how to create a folding chair that is light, stable, compact and viable for industrial production.
The three-disc pivot mechanism allows it to collapse to almost nothing. The transparent polycarbonate dissolves its visual mass and lets it adapt to any environment without imposing.
Success followed as consequence rather than ambition. Millions produced, ubiquitous adoption, a place in MoMA's permanent collection by 1972. But none of this was designed into the object as desire. Plia simply worked and kept working.
Seen alone, Plia risks becoming symbol. Seen within the constellation of Piretti's work (DSC 106-AXIS seating systems, the Platone folding table, the Plona chair), it becomes clear expression of method.
Few elements, legible structures, nothing ornamental, nothing unresolved.

Detail of the joint. Platone, folding table by Anonima Castelli.
© 2026 Anonima Castelli - All right reserved

Platone, folding table by Anonima Castelli. Based on a metal tubular
structure with articulated joints, it folds into a compact volume, optimised for
storage, handling and serial production.
© 2026 Anonima Castelli - All right reserved

Plona, chair by Anonima Castelli. Defined by a tubular steel structure
and essential geometry, it embodies a restrained approach to seating
design, balancing durability, clarity and industrial logic.

This consistency defined our collaboration with him. Design was never abstract. Materials had sources, production had constraints, suppliers had limitations. If something couldn't be manufactured it didn't exist as design. If it couldn't endure use it wasn't finished.
There was no nostalgia in this, no dogma, just clarity.

AXIS 4000, modular seating system by Anonima Castelli. Defined by structural clarity
and adaptability, it was conceived for collective and office environments, balancing
ergonomic performance with industrial precision.
© 2026 Anonima Castelli - All right reserved

What endures?
In a design culture increasingly oriented toward the immediate, toward visibility, velocity, narrative, Piretti's work offers a different measure of value. Not because it resists progress but because it remembers what matters beyond the moment.

AXIS 4000 © 2026 Anonima Castelli - All right reserved

His designs remind us that objects can speak without explaining themselves. That precision carries its own poetry. That restraint is not absence but concentration.

He showed us that design is not about having something to say but about knowing what to do, and then doing it with absolute clarity.

Goodbye, Giancarlo.

You taught us that design doesn't need to announce itself to matter.

That the truest work is often the quietest.

And that lesson, precise, elegant, uncompromising, is what remains.

Alky, lounge chair by Anonima Castelli. Conceived with a rigorous structural logic and
understated profile, it reflects a disciplined reduction of form and a focus on spatial clarity.
© 2026 Anonima Castelli - All right reserved

INFO:
Cover: original artwork by the author, Virginia Alluzzi