F. Alison Biography
Filippo Alison (1930 - 2015), a Neapolitan designer born in 1930, was responsible for the most cultured and far-sighted philological operation linked to the design of the last century, the I Maestri di Cassina collection. The furnishings by Le Corbusier, Asplund, Rietveld, Wright and Mackintosh have survived time thanks to the ideology of historical reconstruction that Alison developed starting from the late 1960s. Architect and design researcher, since 1962 he spent two years in museums around the world, houses and warehouses, as far as Latvia, with his friend François Burkhardt, former director of the Beaubourg in Paris, smelling, viewing and cataloging abandoned "masterful" objects to oblivion, lost in the collective memory, which have been recovered, studied and finally proposed to the public and for modern use. Orchestrating a choir of artisans and workers, he created prototypes of furniture where the necessary skills of the technicians could follow the intellectual criteria of his method which was based on very specific criteria, including the fact that the objects chosen had to be archetypes and representatives of the times cultural belonging; that current techniques were used, according to principles that the author himself would have approved. The objects reproduced in this way are neither originals nor copies, they are not fakes because the will to do so is lacking, much less copies because there is no original to copy. This is what in music we call an author's performance in which all rights are protected by the professionalism of the orchestral players and by the interpretation of the score given by the director as long as the brilliance of the genius is not lost. Since 1971 he has held the chair of Furniture and Interior Architecture at the University of Naples and since 1998 he has directed the School of Specialization in Furniture and Product Design at the University of Naples.
