Ico Parisi (Palermo, Italy 1916- Como, Italy 1996)
A student of Giuseppe Terragni, Ico Parisi is renowned for being one of the main designers of Italian furniture of the 1950s, and a multifaceted spirit that conceived design as being part of a whole with art and architecture. His activity, marked by continuous experimentation, consisted in an incessant research in the fields of architecture, art and design. Between 1948 and 1950 he devoted himself to the study of furniture elements. In the field of design, the crucial encounters with Munari and Fontana (1951), and Melotti profoundly marked his experience. In 1948 he founded, with his wife Luisa Aiani, planner and designer, the studio La ruota in Como which ceased its activity in 1995. Among the most iconic furniture of the couple, there are the tables with aerodynamic lines, with X or Y legs, for its time already very modern and turned in fashion in contemporary décor. From the egg-shaped armchairs for Cassina to the furniture for Stildomus, their works embrace various fields and captured the attention of the American company Singer and Son in New York, the first company, in the 1950s, to export Parisi furniture overseas. In 1954 he won the Gold Medal at the Milan Triennial X with the work Padiglione soggiorno, with Silvio Longhi and Luigi Antonietti. In 1957 he presented the work Casa per vacanze at the exhibition Colori e forme della casa d’oggi, the result of a collaboration with Manlio Rho, Francesco Somaini and Gian Paolo Allevi.
