The seminal architect, designer, critic, and professor Andrea Branzi graduated with a degree from the Università di Firenze, Facoltà di Architettura, Florence, in 1966. That same year, he and fellow architectural students founded the group Archizoom Associati (1966–74), one of the leading voices in the Radical design movement. Subsequent to Archizoom, Branzi participated in the collective Studio Alchimia (1976–84) and its successor organization, Memphis (1981–88). He also maintained his own design practice during this time, producing a series of collections and exhibitions that explored his interest in innovation, materials, and the rethinking of the built environment and the objects that inhabit it.

In 1991 Branzi designed a group of furniture and objects under the title Amnesie for a show at the Design Gallery Milano. For him, the title meant that “we can’t trust our memories, but we can’t rely on total forgetfulness either. The Amnesie are free clearings, blank spaces in a densely occupied territory.”¹ He described the furniture in the exhibition as “nearly architecture, invading space like segments of a wider urban landscape. Objects that can be entered, practicable spaces, micro-environments.”² Placed on the furniture was a series of lathe-cut aluminum or wood vases, optically shimmering and vibrating. Their classical shapes of varying heights and widths seemed to rotate “as if they were somehow almost transparent, like ectoplasms or clusters of crazy molecules.”³

Aluminum was not a new material for Branzi. Precursors to the Amnesie vases is the Four Caryatid Statuettes (1978) that he designed as part of the first Studio Alchimia exhibition in Milan (fig. 9.1). Spun from aluminum, their segmented, balustrade-like forms of various proportions echoed supporting elements of his furniture design from the period. The Amnesie vases, both in aluminum and wood, continued this design language, in itself a reaction to the functionalism of the Bauhaus and the later Ulm school that had been dominant since the 1920s.

As the writer Anne-Marie Fèvre once remarked, “There are civilizations which have not had any architecture, however, all of them have had vases, this useless, indispensable object.”⁴ Branzi has designed numerous vases over the course of his career, wishing “to advance to a new experience based on this old theme.”⁵ Whether utilizing wood, aluminum, porcelain, glass, or plastic, Branzi continually found inspiration in the idea of melding industrial materials and function with nature, as these forms were meant to hold flowers. —Cindi Strauss