#16 Beautiful and well made

2006

“Beautiful and well made” is a fair enough rendition of kalokagathy for our times.
Sounds awful and obscure, but the word’s full of meaning. It links two concepts: “kalos” is “beauty” as it is known in Homeric literature, and “agathos”, an individual’s talent for doing things properly – a paramount virtue for the Ancient Greek citizen and soldier.
Leaving aside the deeper philosophical meanings of the two terms, from a modern-day point of view they acquire a pragmatic connotation and may be translated as “genuine accomplishment”, not least of an economic nature.
The marriage of beauty and of ... Read More

We analyse the balance between beauty and goodness in the contemporary art world with Rosina Gómez Baeza, Director of the International Art Fair ARCO in Madrid. We understand Arco’s values to be the search for quality, internationality and the creation of heritage. Do you believe there is a balance between beauty and goodness in the business ...

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Since 1951, when it was established by Achille Maramotti, the House has practically accompanied the unfolding of women’s fashion over the years, acclaimed from the start for the refined style of its apparel and the quality of its textiles. The Group is now present on the market with thirty lines, different in terms of looks and consumer target. T...

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Little bodies of Siamese children joined together at the hips and huddled to form a group, arranged so as to appear to be posing: the statues of the Chapman brothers are horrific monstrosities. The statues of very young-looking but already sexually mature adolescents of the Japanese artist Tadashi Murakami are no less unsettling. His manga-looking,...

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Paul Goldberger is the Dean of Parsons The New School for Design, and one of the nation’s most eminent critics and writers on architecture and design.  Dean Goldberger has helped shape public understanding of the social and political implications of design for nearly three decades. First, as the architecture critic of The New York Times, where h...

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Conversation during a nice afternoon in Milan under a fair, sunny sky and everything else. Players and characters: Michele de Lucchi: the bearded inventor [MdL] Fabio Castelli: the bookshop owner Scrivàno: the chronicler Three preliminary remarks or so exchanged not without good reason. MdL “Nice and well made”. It’s doing thing...

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The worn threads of a red Turkish carpet, a woman’s silk jacket, the strong lines of a golden pitcher, a hand-drawn wall map... Beauty as the result of the work and thought of a single craftsman fills Susan Vreeland with wonder. Meeting Art was such a strong experience in her life that she felt  “she wanted to keep a Gothic cathedral alive ...

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I can’t help thinking of Carlo Petrini’s basic contention in his latest book, Good, clean and right. “If,” as he writes, “self-nourishment is an agricultural act, then production must be a gastronomic one.” What better way of expressing the osmotic relationship between the beautiful and the well made, which in gastronomy is tantamount t...

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An open space under the sky of Cupertino in California. Software programmers, engineers and industrial designers brainstorming away in a closed room. A clear mission, an important challenge, that of turning an intuition into the reality of a simple and easily useable object. That’s how Apple products are born. It would be hard to consider them...

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by

Beauty is not an end in itself nor is it merely a semantic concept that may translate into French as “jolie” or into Italian as “bello”. Beauty is something of far greater width, breadth and depth; it may refer as much to individuals as to objects, to ways of doing things, to production processes even. It’s only in the eighteenth century,...

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Images

  • Mariafrancesca Piccirillo

    Form-action laboratories for children Re-use is a child’s play!

  • Rosa madera

    DESIGNED DULY. As in a mathematical function as well as in the design process, every variable influences the result, the answer to the question.

  • Lucia Iuliano

    BIO AND BE COOL. The precious gems give their place to small bioplastic solids which embody unusual shapes made of precious metals.

  • Giusi Troia

    HUMAN DESIGN. Man, since ever module for architecture and model for designed objects.

  • Elena Laudante

    THE ART OF NATURE. Every cockroach looks beautiful to its mum!

  • Elena Laudante

    THE GAME OF NATURE. Every piece in the correct position… perfect!

  • Mariafrancesca Piccirillo

    1, 2, 3, 5, 8… Fibonacci’s obsession

  • Giovanni Meo

    HIC ET NUNC. A good design is a continuous present between natural and artificial.

  • Pina Andreana Russo

    I TRAVEL CLEAN. We appreciate the effort.

  • Marianna Scalera

    MUTE ALPHABET. Beautiful and well done.

  • Concetta Santo

    DESIGN SEEDS. Keywords to let good design bloom.

  • Pasquale Salzillo

    VENUS. Beauty is mainly in the eyes of the one who wants to see it.

  • Pasquale Salzillo

    VENUS. Beauty is mainly in the eyes of the one who wants to see it.

  • Mariafrancesca Piccirillo

    SFOGLIATELLA. The design of beauty/sweetness.

  • Filomena Golino

    INPUT/OUTPUT. From a good concept to a good project and vice-versa.

  • Vincenzo Fiorillo

    CONTACT. From the hominid to the man in space.

  • Vincenzo Fiorillo

    CREATION. The process that has given life to the universe and its creatures

  • Filomena Golino

    DANCE MOVE. Balance and harmony.

  • Rosanna Sorbo

    DESIGN GAUGE. To calibrate in order to shape things.

  • Giovanni Meo

    SENSIBLE SPACE. Interaction and morphing.