Otto

Aldo Cibic was born in Schio, Vicenza, Italy in 1955, and quickly developed a self-directed interest in the world of design. In 1981, as a partner in Sottsass Associati, he was a founding member of Memphis, an artists’ collective that was to mark an epoch-making transition in the universe of design and architecture. By vocation and inclination an innovator, one who has never favoured generic labels nor stylistic excesses, Cibic adopted "experimentation as praxis". In the late 1980s he founded the Studio Cibic and launched “Standard” (1991), his first selfproduced collection. At the same time he became a teacher at the Domus Academy and set up research activities with various schools, while developing his ideas around the "design of services". His projects, such as "The Solid Side" (1995) and "New Stories New Design" (2002), fostered a dynamic relationship between people and space and offered a new mode of designing places based on social interactions. He continued in this vein in subsequent years with "Microrealities" (2004) and "Rethinking Happiness" (2010). Both were presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and both invent contemporary narratives aimed at multiplying opportunities for meetings, exchanges and sharing in community life. In 2015, he curated the Venice Architecture Biennale of the Arts & Crafts exhibition at the Venice pavilion. In 1989 he founded the practice Cibic & Partners and, in 2010, the Cibicworkshop, not only a design studio but also a multidisciplinary research centre, began to focus more heavily on alternative sustainable project types aimed at enhancing whole local areas and defining new cultural, emotional and environmental awarenesses of public space. Aldo Cibic teaches at the Politecnico di Milano, the IUAV, Venice, and the Domus Academy; he is an honorary professor at the Tongji University, Shanghai.