How has Memphis influenced your later work?
I answer with an example. The Vigilius Mountain Resort we completed in 2003 in the Italian Dolomites is a stunning celebration of materiality in general, larch wood in particular. My work with Ettore Sottsass and Memphis two decades ago was the complete antithesis. But I find these seemingly disparate attitudes identical. I'm trying to climb the unexplored mountain. In the 1980's, exploration was about language and icons. Now it's all about sustainability and feasibility.
How did you meet Ettore Sottsass?
I was attending UCLA in 1975. I almost spent a year kite-flying. But it was there that I met Sottsass, who enticed me to Milan.
I stopped by his studio, and he asked me to stay for a few days to do some drawings for Alessi. Five years later, in 1984, I opened my own studio, which today employs 50 architects, designers and graphic designers in Milan, with a second, smaller office in Zurich.
How do you approach design?
We try to do all: watches, porcelain tableware, cast-aluminum cookware, bathroom products. As a branding exercise for Illy we created blank white espresso cups, subsequently decorated by 250 international designers and graphic artists. We have designed surprisingly few office chairs, however. I try to avoid furniture because it couldn't be better than Eames, Le Corbusier, or Mies.
As far as architecture is concerned we range from retail systems all over the world, showrooms to corporate facades but hotels are my current passion. I've spent 20 years traveling between Europe and the Far East, so I've become a consumer of hospitality models. A lot can be done in finding the soul of a place.
What was the moment when you knew you would be a designer?
The main influence on my career comes from my parents: my father influenced me to behave like a entrepreneur and working with my mother in our family company of hand created ceramics stimulated my creativity
What is the most amazing design you've ever seen?
Pissoir Fontana chosen by Marcel Duchamp in 1917. Plywood Chair designed in 1950 by Charles Eames. Villa Malaparte, Capri.
What does your home look like?
A white penthouse in the center of Milan, facing the neogothic profile of the duomo di Milano.
What advice would you give to someone who has just moved into a new, empty home and doesn't know where to start?
To be inspired by lightness-quickness-durability. I would suggest to concentrate on psychophyisical well-being based on simplicity and not on stylistic fiction, giving place to soul.
How does being a designer and architect affect the way you see the world?
I am an architect driven by a strong curiosity that pushes me towards artistic research and towards a continuous evolution of language.
How can you characterize your style?
I'm a generalist, not a specialist -- from the spoon to the town -- is the slogan created by Ernesto Rogers in 1952 in the Charta of Athens. He explained the typical approach of a Milanese architect, designing a spoon, a chair, and a lamp and in the same day working on a skyscraper. We call this scale jumping in the Milanese jungle.
How does your work respond to current conditions, like the environment?
We always try to create sustainablility with the brief to respect nature and surroundings, whether that means a hotel at 1,500 mt., or the interior of a business hotel. They are all part of a multisensorial atmosphere: aesthetic and technical durability is an overriding theme.
I am always driven by genius loci, meaning that all my projects try to respect nature with the hope that our children will find the planet earth in same conditions as we found it when we were born.
You've designed many watches, which calculate the passage of time, and tea sets, used to sit and relax and share with others. Your buildings are permanent fixtures in a city's skyline, or prefab constructions that might allow for people of average means to live in above-average homes. These designs all seem to carry clues of your philosophy on life. What is that philosophy?
I like the expression 'resonance... not ego' (eco-non ego), meaning that in 50 years people shouldn't speak about Matteo Thun's creative result but about his influence in innovative processes.