Venti, an Ode to Steel and Water
QuadroDesign and the photography research led by Luca A. Caizzi to celebrate the brand’s 20 years anniversary: a story of a family, of places and evolving design. Images collected in the coffee table book ‘Venti’.
A series of keywords placed with studied randomness on a cover that is perfect in its square format and its off-white. This is how Venti appears, a precious photographic research volume, also available for sale in selected bookshops, with which QuadroDesign tells its story through the images taken by Luca A. Caizzi. Marco Sammicheli’s introductory words (collected during a visit to the company in autumn 2020) summarise an exemplary family history begun by Carmelo and Giuliana Magistro in the 1960s and continued by the second generation, their children Elena and Enrico. Today, under the Quadro brand, which celebrated its 20th anniversary, it is defined as a company that researches and produces designer taps and fittings.
The photographer’s sensitive gaze lingers on and interprets themes that are founding values at QuadroDesign: first and foremost the territorial roots in the province of Novara (the heart of the faucet industrial district) where water and the mountains all around have always been treated with respect by the Magistro family, choosing a non-aggressive production approach before the times imposed it.
Proud to be on the shores of Lake Orta, a small Piedmontese jewel, whose reclamation required a twenty-year commitment.
The journey from the company’s origins to the present is a journey, which in some pages takes place along the road leading to the headquarters, immortalising glimpses of everyday life, nature, amarcords, others in images taken in the company where minimal architectural details are also brought to life as a result of the office redesign, just completed and signed by the Milanese Studio Wok.
The solid inheritance of values and skills allows QuadroDesign to explore future paths, relying on new eyes, in this case those of a young and searching photographer. One scrolls through the pages immersed in an almost Nordic rigour and abstraction while the double pages offer diptychs of images, between which one feels like looking for the link. Nothing is more powerful and refined than telling the story of an object without actually ever revealing it, by telling the story of what is around it.
”I have observed the places that have fostered Quadro’s organic growth for twenty years, from its headquarters in San Maurizio D’Opaglio, through Pella to the lake water that bathes the banks that grow, rise and become mountains in Stresa. What do the eyes of Elena and Enrico, the new generation that thinks, cares and creates, see? What did Giuliana and Carmelo Magistro’s eyes see when they built the company?” Luca A. Caizzi.
Venti will soon be available for sale online and in selected bookshops, a journey of discovery of places, people and passion. For information and to know where to buy the book, do so by sending an email to info@quadrodesign.it.