The Oblique Side of Design

Pio Manzù

Abstract

Until now, we have lived with the knowledge that traces left on paper can still, after some time, reveal the designer's intentions: an example for all the Codices of Leonardo da Vinci. Today, with digital design, this is no longer the case. Preserving the drawings that generations of designers on paper have left us is not just identity protectionism but the tangible appropriation of how ideas were born, evolved and contributed to cultural change. Since 2015 the Fondazione Manzoni Arte e Design has been responsible for preserving and studying the entire oeuvre of one of the Italian designers who gave the most significant impetus to the innovation of car design in Italy and the world: Pio Manzù. Pio Manzù's design clearly defines the end of the American hegemony of the Streamline practised up to that time as a functional and elegant style as a stylistic feature of modernity in the design of means of transport. To the curved line that follows and invites aerodynamics, Manzù replaces the oblique side of a pure and elementary geometry deliberately recognisable as a sign of rationality. Recognising his stylistic mark as a designer can be understood as merely recognising identity. However, instead, it takes on the role of a stimulating stimulus to find the mental and, therefore, design paths that have matured the forms we have used to change our visions of the changing world, with Pio Manzù looking at the oblique side.