Giancarlo Mattioli

Born in Bologna in 1933, Giancarlo Mattioli was an Italian designer, architect, urban planner, portrait artist, man and intellectual who enjoyed great success in the 1950s and 1960s. Whilst a student at an art school, he never lost his passion for pen-and-ink drawing, which he had inherited from his teachers. He graduated in architecture in Florence and, in 1961, founded the group of urban architects ‘Città Nuova’ with Pierluigi Cervellati, Umberto Maccaferri, Franco Morelli, Gianpaolo Mazzucato and Mario Zaffagnini.

In 1965, as part of the ‘Città Nuova’ group of urban architects, he took part in the ‘Studio Artemide Domus di Milano’ competition, through which Artemide and Editrice Domus sought to discover new ways of conceiving lamps as lighting objects. The submitted design was a lamp inspired by the shape of a jellyfish, in which Mattioli and the Group’s professionals explored new ways of achieving soft ambient lighting using a fixture designed to conceal the bulb.

The project was a success and the lamp went into production in 1967 under the name Nesso; it went on to become a symbolic icon of that era and enjoyed enduring success, as evidenced by the fact that it remains part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
A designer of modern classics, Mattioli never hesitated to think outside the box: an intellectual with a genuine passion for civic affairs, he was also the technical architect behind the historic town planning schemes of the late 1960s for the municipality of Bologna. He was recruited by the then city councillor, Giuseppe Campos Venuti, and remained there continuously, as a staff member and director of the technical offices, until 1999. He contributed to the plan for the historic centre, the hillside plan, the plan for the industrial district, the 1985–86 master plan and the new railway junction.
He died in 2018 at the age of 85.