Ernesto Gismondi

From 1964 to 1984 he was associate professor of Missile Engines at the Politecnico di Milano. He was vice president of ADI – Associazione per il Disegno Industriale  and has held numerous positions in Assolombarda, Federmeccanica, Confindustria, the Autonomous Fiera di Milano and at the Ministry for University and Research. He was also a member of the Scientific Didactic Committee of the I.S.I.A. (Higher Institute for Artistic Industries / Industrial design) of Florence, with the appointment of the Ministry of Public Education, the College of Arbitrators of Cosmit (organizing committee of the Salone del Mobile in Milan) and the CNEL, upon designation by the Presidency of the Republic. He has chaired and participated in numerous seminars, in Italy and abroad, on design and its developments and on energy saving applied to lighting.

In 2017 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Salone del Mobile.Milano award “for the sense of contemporaneity, for the innate talent in knowing how to develop continuous formal solutions that at the same time combine a state of lightness with the ability to evoke a near future”, reads the motivation (read here). In 2008 he was awarded the Ernst & Young Award “The Entrepreneur of the Year 2008” for the Innovation category, in addition to the prestigious appointment as Cavaliere del Lavoro conferred by the President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano. In 2009 he received the Ernst & Young Award “Entrepreneur of the Year 2009” in the Comunication category.

In 2018 he won the Compasso d'Oro for his career with the following jury motivation: “Aerospace engineer, university professor and entrepreneur, in short: a man of multifaceted genius. Founder of Artemide, he immediately uses design processes as a distinctive factor and in this long path he encourages and enhances collaborations with the national and international design world. A coherent example of how the design project can be a concrete strategic lever of cultural and economic growth, it has always worked so that Italian design could be a virtuous example at an international level”. The same year, the innovative Discovery suspension he designed was also awarded the Compasso d’Oro (read here).

The Mayor of Milan Beppe Sala remembers him like this on facebook “With the death of Ernesto Gismondi, we lose one of the protagonists of that world of design that made Milan great. He himself, an aerospace engineer, has said several times that he had chosen Milan attracted by its great vitality in the 1960s. But it is to people like Ernesto Gismondi that we owe the development of Milanese design as a synonym of Italian Life Style all over the world. We will have to follow his lesson very carefully, already in the firm hands of his beloved Carlotta, in order to resume the path of our new development in the coming years”.

“Ernesto Gismondi, a great innovator and friend, left us. He illuminated the world with Artemide, was the first to use plastic to make furniture, raced head-on in the seas of politics and entrepreneurship, opened new horizons in design. I will miss his anti-rhetorical genius” writes Stefano Boeri on twitter.

(text by Claudia Foresti)

Read also the in-depth analysis on the website by Interni May 2020