Achille Castiglioni (1918–2002) won Italy’s Compasso d’Oro nine times. Fourteen of his works sit in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. In 1997, MoMA gave him the first individual design retrospective it had ever devoted to an Italian.

His most celebrated objects were assembled from parts designed for completely unrelated purposes: a tractor seat became a stool, a car headlight became a lamp, a bicycle saddle became a perch for making phone calls. He called it observation. Critics called it Dadaist. Both were right.

This video traces Castiglioni’s life from wartime Milan through his sixteen-year partnership with his brother Pier Giacomo, the founding of Flos, the design of the Arco lamp, and the thirty-four years he spent working alone after his brother’s passing in 1968.

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