Domus Academy - From The Rib of Domus Magazine

From The Rib of Domus Magazine

Domus magazine was founded in Milan in 1928 by Giò Ponti, a young designer from La Rinascente, who was destined to become one of the most important architects of the twentieth century. The following year, a young man who would go on to prove himself in the publishing world, Gianni Mazzocchi, put all his savings in the magazine and over two years bought up most of its shares. At the beginning of the 1980s Domus was edited by Alessandro Mendini who had previously been the editor of Casabella and Modo; and the art director was Ettore Sottsas Jr. Mazzocchi’s two daughters were also working at the publishing house: Giovanna was following in her father’s footsteps in publishing; Maria Grazia had been on the editorial staff of the magazine since 1973. Almost every day the magazine received large quantities of letters from students and young architects all over the world who wanted to come to Italy to study design, given that the country was by then considered the homeland of the ‘blue-print’ thanks to the talent of some of the great designers who established themselves in the seventies. The paradox, in fact, was that Italian design had met with success all over the world, despite the absence of any design faculty of international renown in our country. On the vanguard at the time for its focus on corporate image there was the huge company Olivetti, which indeed it was not a university. There were The Umanitaria - an old Milanese institution – which had founded its school of design, then the Scuola Politecnica di Design, where Bruno Munari, Max Huber, Isao Hosoe and Narciso Silvestrini taught; the Istituto Europeo di Design, which offered preparation courses with a pragmatic approach and clear disposition towards ‘doing’. But none of them had an international reputation nor did they offer any postgraduate courses. It was the young foreigners' requests to Domus magazine that gave Maria Grazia Mazzocchi, along with Alessandro Mendini and Alessandro Guerriero, the idea of founding an international, postgraduate design school that would not merely teach graphic arts; they had several meetings with Ettore Sottsass and out of them came the project of founding Domus Academy. The details were finalised in United States, where they had met Pierre Restany – theorist and art critic of the Nouveau Réalisme - who suggested appointing Andrea Branzi as the first director, and who proposed the name of the school: Domus Academy, evocative of the world-famous magazine.