Luca Casini, architect and designer founded his studio based in Milan in 1997. He worked as an industrial designer in widely differing sectors, with a number of well-known companies in Italy and major industrial groups abroad, mainly in Germany and the United States. He has designed fashion accessories and products for furnishing, ranging from eyewear to jewellery, from cutlery to door handles and furniture, including limited edition artistic pieces. Luca Casini has enjoyed wide international recognition and some of his works have appeared in exhibitions and museums in Italy and abroad. His work has been featured in major trade journals. He has received awards including the Good Design Award, the Red Dot Design Award (6), the DesignPlus, the Baden Württemberg Design Award, the Home & Trend Award and other awards in the field of design.
Shelves BABILA Fiam Italia Design (©) Luca Casini
Lets discover more about him
– What are the biggest challenges you have met in your career?
I cannot say about a specific work but I think every project should be treated as a challenge as well as an opportunity. This means that you have to do your best to meet the expectations of your client, of the users of the product but also for your personal research and your own growth in facing a new experience. Because every new project is a new experience.
– How would you describe your work?
Our work requires practical and technological skills, but the sense of the project in the context, as well as its aesthetic evolution, remain central and crucial aspects. Our work is our passion and we dedicate time and attention to all these factors.
I have always felt an attraction for simple, pure and logical forms, an absolute fascination as well as that exercised by more expressive and complex shapes generated by our imagination in the most articulated artistic sphere. Not disregarding the observation of all of these aspects, my work has evolved by finding a design balance that has allowed me to explore different modes of expression with a rather eclectic approach. I was lucky enough to develop products in very different fields and this allowed me to apply and adapt my creativity to the specific needs of each project.
– How is your passion for visual art and design born?
As happens to many children, I too loved taking objects apart to discover how they worked, I loved drawing and imagining new objects and strangely shaped skyscrapers, I looked with great curiosity at the images in the furniture magazines that my mother bought. The father of one of my neighbors was an art critic and with her we looked at the drawings of contemporary artists. Subsequently I attended an art school where I studied sculpture, painting and art in general. It was in that period that my true passion was born, visiting exhibitions and studying the products in detail. Then I graduated in architecture, which in my day was the most suitable university for those who wanted to become industrial designers. More or less random steps, now remote, that actually directed my passions towards my current job.
– Outside of design, what are you currently interested in and how is it influencing your design work?
I love photography, especially in black and white, because even just subtracting the color gives me the sensation of filtering reality and making it more relative, or making me more aware of a more complex and profound reality hidden by the world in which we are immersed.
Certainly this passion of mine has an influence on my work, a good part of my work develops by observing the world around me and drawing inspiration from it, so it is natural that even a photographic shot can play a role in this process.
Luca Casini