Alessi - Alessandro Mendini, Michael Graves, Yuri Soloviev e Arata Isozaki - Cooking pot set (4) - Knobs and lid - Falstaff - Plastic, Stainless steel

Alessi Made in Italy
Design: Alessandro Mendini, lid for pan or pot FALSTAFF series
Year 1998
+ 3 very rare and out of print new knobs in box designed for the upper part of the lid by
- ARATA ISOZAKI - "Scooping the moon"
- YURI SOLOVIEV - "Leningrad"
- MICHAEL GRAVES - "New England"
The knobs are new, never used, complete with packaging and information leaflet.
Unfindable and for connoisseurs.

From the Mendini atelier website:

1988

After the experience achieved with the "Orion's Belt" designed by Richard Sapper, the Alessi industry is preparing an important innovation, with which it intends to enter deeply into the cookware market. It is a very complex line of cookware, which will be ready in the autumn of 1988. It will begin with eight basic types (casseroles, pans, pans. . .) and then extend to others. This line intends to establish itself, in the history of cookware over the last 30 years, as a high-series product for the international medium and medium-high market, based on the cultural authority of the Alessi brand, and on the unparalleled technological experience of the Lagostina industry, which will produce the pan bodies themselves (large automated chains) . Entrusted to Alessandro Mendini, the project is designed for a vast emerging class: alongside the guarantees offered by a normal and calm language suitable for a traditional reception of the product, the line of new cookware does not lack a fresh and young hypothesis of new design, of playful new wave in the kitchen. A slight transgression, centered especially on the cone shape of the lid, as well as on the handles (and handles and knobs) , is accompanied by the idea of reliability, functionality, durability, safety, practicality.
The design project will be integrated into a more general promotion, advertising and packaging project, also through a book by the chef Gualtiero Marchesi on regional Italian recipes (Mondadori publisher) , which will bear the same title as the series of pots.
To make the project more complex and interesting from a design perspective, it was decided to introduce a design "game", a little surrealist and conceptual: the idea is to focus particular attention on the "knob" of the pot lid, which in effect - in the image of the same desired by Mendini - turns out to be a kind of very small but significant monument, placed on the top of a smooth conical hill, in a metaphysical square. Three other "designer knobs" will therefore flank the "knob/base" designed by Mendini: they will be, according to our hypothesis, "mini-monuments", designed by. . .
This game, suitable for qualifying the product and creating cultured attention around it, fits both in the policy of the Alessi catalog (which also presents itself as a museum of great architects/designers) , and in the experimental discourse of Mendini (which it is often based on the unexpected eclecticism due to the mixture of different languages) .