Deconstructing Product Design

il Conico Kettle

Aldo for Alessi, 1986

1. Like Aldo Rossi’s buildings, the il Conico emphasizes basic geometries in interesting ways, employing a kind of Euclidian recursion to add depth and interest to its primal form. How does a noted architect find inspiration for the design of everyday kitchen objects? Aldo Rossi comments: “I have always had a strong interest in objects, instruments, apparatus, tools … without intending to I used to linger for hours in the large kitchen at S., on Lake Como, drawing the coffeepots, the pans, the bottles. I particularly loved the strange shapes of the coffeepots enameled blue, green, red; they were miniatures of the fantastic architectures that I would encounter later.”
2. The lid completes the conical form ...