Alchimia @ archithese

Studio Alchimia

Postradical Design Revolution

“In Florence in the 1970s, a group of architects and designers said, ‘Wait a minute, let’s take a look at what’s happening around us.’ That’s how Global Tools came about, which was extremely important. Without this project, Alchimia would not have existed. It all started with Global Tools,” explained Alessandro Guerriero, co-founder of Alchimia, in an interview.

Guerriero was referring to the Global Tools collective, which was co-founded by Superstudio in 1973 and was primarily active in Florence, the center of political discourse in Italy at the time. Global Tools (1973–1975) was an association of radical left-wing design laboratories that emerged in the context of the 1968 student movement to jointly promote alternative design and art ideas. According to Guerriero, “those who were working in Florence at the time then moved to Milan, which had the effect of an atomic bomb, our Italian cultural bomb.”

According to Guerriero, architects and designers in Milan were able to draw on a flourishing tradition of craftsmanship. This gave the designers at Studio Alchimia the opportunity to exercise their autonomy and creative freedom, allowing them to design and produce independently of industrial and commercial constraints—mostly for collections featuring unique pieces and small series, which were presented in impressive settings.

The principles formulated by Global Tools and their critical stance toward technocratic thinking and industrial mass production remained of great importance to Studio Alchimia. Similar to Global Tools, Studio Alchimia also viewed design as cultural production. Poetic moments and aesthetic and emotional values were at the heart of this approach.

Distancing itself clearly from the modernist functionalism (and reduced interpretation) of the Bauhaus that prevailed at the time, Studio Alchimia was able to present itself as a counter-model to it. In an allusion to the Bauhaus and at the same time as a critique of it, Studio Alchimia’s first collections were ironically titled Bau. Haus Uno (1979) and Bau. Haus Due (1980/1981).

Following in the footsteps of medieval alchemists who attempted to turn simple materials into gold, Studio Alchimia celebrated the banal and kitschy in order to transform it into “magical” objects. The designs often used everyday, inexpensive materials such as laminates. With this aesthetic of the trivial, Studio Alchimia pursued a playful maximalism in order to develop a counterworld.

Criticism of the rigor of functionalist design and abstract minimalism in modernism was expressed with irony and a delight in paradoxes. In the iconic Poltrona di Proust armchair—designed in 1978 by Alessandro Mendini in the context of Studio Alchimia—the surface of a neo-baroque fauteuil is covered with a hand-painted pointillist pattern. It is a colorful redesign of a classic with references to literature (Marcel Proust) and painting (Paul Signac), an intellectual play with complex decorative sign systems that consciously and joyfully incorporates kitsch into the distinguished habitus of design.

Studio Alchimia was known for its critical stance toward the commercialization of the design industry. Guerriero explains: “In the 1980s, we created an ‘outdoor area’ for the Salone del Mobile in Milan because we wanted to criticize the event. When the Poltrona di Proust armchair was presented at the Salone del Mobile, it was exhibited in the outdoor area in a closed, inaccessible box with a small hole through which you could see inside. We didn’t write who made it or even designed it. You could only see the armchair through the hole, that was all.” The presentation of the armchair was a game full of inversions: not inside, but outside the Salone del Mobile; not openly displayed to the trade fair audience, but hidden and visible only to one person at a time through a peephole; not emphasizing authorship, but presented anonymously.

The staging of the collections was very important to Studio Alchimia. They understood the importance of media coverage very early on and used it effectively with the help of seductive covers and publications in architecture and design magazines such as Casabella, Modo, and Domus. Studio Alchimia used the evocative power of images, including the theatrical photos of the Milanese photo studio Occhiomagico. They also pursued highly exploratory approaches, for example, in their collaboration with the experimental Milanese video and film collective Metamorphosi.

Studio Alchimia staged its object presentations as theatrical Gesamtkunstwerke. This truly transdisciplinary studio, which also functioned as a platform and agency, promoted the convergence of genres and creative fields: product design came together not only with fashion, decorative art, and architecture, but also with painting and sculpture, installation art, stage design, theatrical productions and performance art, music, artistic photography, and experimental video production.

This was an important factor in Studio Alchimia’s innovative strength. Guerriero had this to say about transdisciplinarity: “We worked hard on it when we realized that the disciplines were closely related. And that they needed to oxygenate each other. So we mixed them, we intertwined them. Architecture drew on fashion, design on art. And everyone became intertwined in an unprecedented orgasm of disciplines.”

According to Guerriero, Studio Alchimia’s working method was very simple: “We didn’t say, ‘Oh, let’s build a chair, this way or that way.’ We didn’t start by saying, ‘Oh, let’s build a table.’ Instead, we came up with a theoretical title around which we could build objects, many or few, simple or complex. This title immediately led to a text, and then the whole group referred to this text when designing the objects.

Some titles were very successful and productive, and we created many objects from them, while others were not so successful. For example, Oggetto Banale (Banale Object) led to an exhibition at the Venice Biennale, where some small objects were presented. It looked like it was going to be something big, but instead it ended with the Venice Biennale and didn’t go any further.”

According to Guerriero, things turned out differently with Il Mobile Infinito (The Infinite Furniture), which was presented in 1981 with a performance by Magazzini Criminali in the parking lot of the architecture faculty of the Politecnico di Milano during the Salone del Mobile 1981. With Il Mobile Infinito, Studio Alchimia wanted to design freely, without restrictions or limits, in a completely open manner. The project involved 35 architects, designers, artists, and writers who deconstructed and recombined furniture elements such as table legs, handles, and decorative parts. The result was an infinite variety of forms and narratives that offered unlimited possibilities for creating spaces and objects that went beyond conventional design principles: a “non-design,” as Studio Alchimia called it—and “the dream of infinity.”

According to Guerriero, Il Mobili Infinito was “a kind of game invented by the Surrealists called Cadavre Exquis (Exquisite Corpse). They took a sheet of paper, drew a small picture on it, folded it, and each person continued the drawing by folding the paper. And in the end, when the paper was opened, there was a kind of extraordinary monster to be seen.”

The interview by Hybrid Space Lab (Elizabeth Sikiaridi and Frans Vogelaar) with Alessandro Guerriero took place on a very hot day in June 2025 in the heavily sealed courtyard of Milan’s Fondazione Prada, designed by Rem Koolhaas/OMA. When we wanted to move our chairs a little further into the shade, the supervisors pointed out the markings on the courtyard floor and explained that the chairs should not leave this area and should remain in straight rows (in the sun). We briefly pondered this completely controlled architectural environment and Rem Koolhaas, who was strongly influenced by Superstudio—and the loss of critical momentum, playfulness, and imagination, of joie de vivre in contemporary architecture and design.

Arriving in the present, Guerriero commented on today’s consumer society: “There are billions of objects. We can’t take in any more items. Where will this end? There is no need for anything. Rejecting production and consumption is already a political and moral stance, because it means making different choices and focusing on social issues.

Either we create spiritual objects, or it is better not to create anything at all!”

 

The original name was Studio Alchymia and was later replaced by Studio Alchimia for reasons of recognizability.

Prof. Elizabeth Sikiaridi and Prof. Frans Vogelaar are the founders of Berlin’s Hybrid Space Lab, a think tank and design lab for architecture, urbanism, design, and digital culture. Frans Vogelaar worked at Studio Alchimia from 1981 to 1982.

 

A major retrospective of the group’s work, entitled “Alchimia. The Revolution of Italian Design,” was on display at the Bröhan Museum in Berlin until September 7, 2025.

The exhibition will next be shown at the ADI Design Museum in Milan.