Issue Nine

    For Emanuela Frattini Magnusson, her profession as an architect and designer was predetermined.  A combination of genetics, she is the daughter of the late Gianfranco Frattini, Milan architect, and weighty heritage, she is a native Italian, and brings cultural content to all she designs.  Design bridges art and science at every scale and contrary to typical scientific conclusions,     she believes design offers a variety of “correct” conclusions.
    It is this perspective and a combination of background, DNA, experiences and influences that design adds the “cultural content” or the personal vision to the function.
    “Although I believe that on an individual level geographical differences don’t necessarily matter that much–I think I have more in common with an architect from New Zealand than with an attorney from Rome–they certainly exist for countries and societies,” says Emanuela Frattini Magnusson, now a New York City resident for more than 15 years.
    When she first moved to New York, Emanuela, her husband Carl and her then two-year-old daughter settled in at Sutton Place on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.  With industrial design as her focus, she sold products through trade shows and eventually placed designs with MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) design.
    After placing a wide variety of products at MoMA, including the Sky Umbrella she and Tibor Kalman designed, EFM began designing interiors for high-end clients in Manhattan.
    Unlike designers in the U.S., Emanuela was schooled to incorporate design into all aspects of life.  In the U.S. you are either an architect, interior designer, industrial designer or web and graphic designer.  But in Italy, design is omnipresent and specializing in one aspect does not exist. 
    “Unlike Europe where design continues to be defined by changes in the realm of ideas and is influenced by tradition, in the United States and specifically, New York, the success of a certain design is largely determined by how intelligent it is, what it needs to fulfill and how marketable it is,” she explains.  “There is a fundamentally pragmatic approach to life, one of enormous richness derived from variety, where diversity is the norm.”
    In his book, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (Perseus Books Group), Richard Florida talks of the growing influence of the creative class–about 40 million people or 30 percent of the workforce.  The term “creative class” refers to idea–or innovation-based occupations.  He states that above and beyond anything else, the most crucial characteristic a place can and should foster-and, not coincidentally, the most difficult one to foster–is diversity.  Tolerance and openness to new ideas and therefore new cultural, social, political and economic opportunities.
    It is this diversity in design, or adding cultural content to design, that allows Emanuela to recognize the need and respond through her multidisciplinary practice.
    An admirer of Charles and Ray Eames as well as Antoni Gaudi, she notes that a designer’s work should not be category, scale or media-specific.
    “Charles and Ray Eames are a good example of how a multidisciplinary practice has been a successful source of innovation,” she explains.  “This is also one of the reasons for the renewed interest in their work, the admiration for a scope of work that covers every possible category and means of expression of their time.”  “Antoni Gaudi from Barcelona was a furniture designer, architect, graphic artist, urban planner and landscape architect,” she says.  “My background is architecture, but I like to think of myself as an “architect at large.”
    Emanuela Frattini Magnusson’s designs include the Propeller Table for Knoll.  A multi-functioning piece, it is the company’s best selling product in their Studio collection.  Knoll approached her again to design a wooden side chair.  She came up with the Cecilia Chair a lightweight, inexpensive solution that crosses both commercial and residential applications.
    She notes furniture design in the U.S.  is linked to weight, that is if it appears too light it appears weak.  “The Cecilia chair is a lightweight elegant wooden side chair that is more substantial than it appears to be.  I don’t see lightness as weakness, but as elegance,” she says.  Introduced in 2003, the chair has won a Good Design award from the Chicago Athenaeum.
    It is no surprise her designs have been sought after by Knoll, a company rich in design and Bauhaus heritage.  She recently completed new packaging for Knoll Textiles’ sampling box. 
    Designs for graphics, packaging, textiles, product, glassware and jewelry, furniture and architecture are intimately tied in with her daily work.  As a specifier of these products, she often sees the gaps the manufacturer has in the product offering.  This extends into the realm of color as well.  She was approached by HBF Textiles to design a collection of contract-oriented textiles, with no textile design experience she came up with the concept of things that are “askew” or unexpected.  From this she created the 14 patterns that make up the colorful and dynamic Askew Collection. 
    “The power and importance of color has affected the work of many, from Beethoven’s studies to Le Corbusier,” she says.  “We do not normally associate Le Corbusier with color, because the documentation of his work is in black and white photography, but when the unite d’habitation in Marseille was renovated, the study of the original specifications revealed the extensive use of strong and bold primaries.”
    Modernism is colorful and it is illustrated in all her work.
    Emanuela was commissioned as one of the architects to design a modern residential development in Miami called Aqua.  She designed a town home that works with the colorful Miami landscape but conceived for today’s life and use.
    “Craig Robins, the developer, is one of those precious clients who understand the added value that design brings to a project and always invites architects to his team,” she says.
    Her work incorporates a wit and humor suggesting that this is fun disguised as work. 
    Her whimsy is apparent in the Oliver Collection, her glass designs for Salviati.  An Italian-based company sought her design expertise and invited her to Murano to help develop what would later become a collection of grappa, water and wine glasses.  She added a “drop” of color at the base of the glass where the stem and vessel meet, creating a fun and sophisticated and wholly original collection for Salviati.

    She proclaims Spinneybeck, the Getzville, New York-based leather company, “as one of her favorite clients.”
    Spinneybeck has benefited from her multidisciplinary talents.  As architect and interior designer of their new Getzville, New York world headquarters, the Italian leather supplier has Emanuela design all their graphics, website, color introductions, sampling materials as well as club products.
    The 33,000 square foot facility doubles as a working warehouse (home to more than two million square feet of leather) as well as corporate headquarters.  Possibly one of the best “smelling” places in upstate New York.
    Spinneybeck looks to Emanuela to keep them plugged into the architect and design (A&D) community.  “She adds cultural content to our line, which is a commodity,” explains Roger Wall, president of Spinneybeck.  “She recognizes the trends and we work together to package our product to meet those new needs.”
    One of those trends was architectural applications or using leather in unconventional ways, such as on walls and handrails, for rugs and tiles and wrapped panels for walls.  Truly a luxury item, Spinneybeck leather is the leader in its category.  Emanuela conceives and develops color collections and supports the introductions with “stories” or a cerebral reasoning to its validity. 
    For instance, Spinneybeck offers more than 800 color ways and black remains a significant percentage of their sales.  She developed a graphic piece entitled “The Little Black Book” (wink wink) and embossed a string of pearls on the cover.  Inside is the “story” of black or what cultural role it has played in our lives.
    “Humor is a very powerful tool and design doesn’t have to be dead serious all the time,” she says with a smile.  “In the end design at all scales is about doing things better.”

    –photos of Emanuela by Mark Dellas