product designer, born 1932, lives in Milan / Italy

 

His Tizio table lamp (for Artemide) from the early 1970s is a finely calibrated balancing act. This original game with counterbalances made the lamp one of the mega milestones of design history and a veritable symbol of design itself. Sapper,one of the most successful of international designers, has again and again sent ripples through the world of design from his home base in Italy. With his teaching activities in Stuttgart he is in addition a great role model, having shaped the aesthetic of our everyday lives for over half a century. Of the Munich-borndesigner, whose career began at Mercedes-Benz, colleague Ettore Sottsass once said he was incapable of producing a bad design. Sapper’s products are precise, functional, innovative and often highly complex. He always endeavours to find solutions and to “give form a meaning”. There is almost nothing the busy designer has not put his hand to at some point in his life. With his mentor, the Italian Marco Zanuso, the young Sapper developed radios and television sets of extremely innovative design in the 1960s (for Brionvega). The same period saw one of the first fully plastic chairs, the K 4999 for children (for Kartell), which soon stood as model for countless “adult” counterparts. The same team was responsible for the Lambda metal chair (for Gavina, 1964), which is made out of ten thin punched steel sheets. The office chair named after him from the late 1970s, the Sapper (for Knoll), likewise has exemplary status. Other furniture, usually for the office, was conceived for companies including B&B Italia, CAP, Castelli and Molteni, as well as an entire home office collection for Unifor. In the 1980s the Thinkpad laptop series for IBM and the 9091 water kettle (for Alessi) were the postmodern icons that gave the object of daily use a whole new standing. With the lightweight Aida garden furniture (for Magis), the dean of design then went on to lend restaurants and private outdoor celebrations a touch of elegance. Sapper, who in recent years has once again worked often in Germany, is perhaps the best example of the synthesis of German perfectionism with Italian sensuality.