Interview with Daniel Lago - art director of LAGO.

Passing the gallery

Interview prepared: Oksana Kashenko

Portraiture: Oksana Kashenko

Magazine: N4 (93) 2005

In May 2004, the Chelsea Art Museum in New York once again began the annual world tour of the hundred best pieces of Italian design, called I.DoT (Italian Design on Tour). Two of these bestsellers were created by a man named Daniel Lago Probably, this fact could be ignored. If the items created by Daniel had never been recognized as bestsellers before; if these objects were not furniture; if the furniture produced under the Lago brand was not so popular in Russia ... and if the route of this tour did not pass through our latitudes this year (for a report on the I.DoT exhibition in St. Petersburg, see the next issue).Daniel Lago born in 1972. He was the youngest child in the family. Even without waiting for graduation, has already started working at a family business. Although Daniel himself considers himself to be self-taught, his education is very decent: he graduated from the Italian school of design in Padua. Over the past ten years, he has designed a dozen pieces of furniture: from chairs to cabinets. And more than half of them received prestigious awards. As a rule, the same thing for the year collected several prizes, as was the case with the Statica bookshelf system and the Logica chair, which were ranked last year among the hundred best Italian design products. Now Daniel is the art director of the Lago company.SALON: Where do such non-standard forms come from? - Custom? In fact, they are simple. For me, it is important that the whole thing looks simple, although it is very difficult to achieve this. Design is a very serious thing, which is based on both form and much more. Look at the Statica collection. The most important thing in it is that the shelves are held by the principle of the lever. From this point of view, the form we have given to “Statics” is a logical continuation of the applied principle. And it simply cannot look differently.S: Your style is recognizable and difficult to attribute to minimalism. What do you think, what is this style? - True design has nothing to do with bare style. Behind each of our products is a very clear, well-expressed idea. Take, for example, what Achille Castiglioni did. In the objects that emerged from his pen, there was always a soul. They always had a very strong, bright idea. I try to design the same way. I try to have logic in each of our objects. For me, design is not just a combination of texture, pattern and material thickness for the sake of beauty. This is something more. Here, for example, the storage system Net. You have seen it hundreds of times, it is often put in Russian living rooms, at least judging by the photos in your magazine. This is such a wall, assembled from cubes in a checkerboard pattern. Since the wall space is exactly half filled, the wall looks very easy. But the design trick is not that. The trick is that we vertically connected the cubes with a rod on which the boxes can rotate. Therefore, in just one minute you can do something very dynamic and, if desired, asymmetrical from your neat symmetrical chess wall. Or, our new product is the "36.8" system. Imagine that your wall is lined up with 36.8x36.8 cm cells. The rules of the game are as follows: the length of the shelves cannot exceed six cells, the width is always equal to one cell. You can arrange the shelves both horizontally and vertically. With this collection, any consumer can create the configuration that he likes, especially since we offer more than twenty colors of decoration. This is a unique offer in the storage market.S: Tell us about the material Soft Wood. - It is better to see with my own eyes. Because when I talk about a wooden soft bench or a wooden soft headboard, they don’t understand me. Although everything is simple. The surface of these objects consists of small wooden squares, below them - several layers of secret material. Click on the squares - they go inside, bend. Hence the name Soft Wood.S: And how is your house furnished? - The biggest wall in my house is painted in our corporate red. I picked up the furniture in neutral white. Practically everything that I have is produced by our company. But since we are not releasing fixtures, I took models created by Philippe Starck for the Flos company.