Luigi Caccia Dominioni

Luigi Caccia Dominioni (7 December 1913 – 13 November 2016) was an Italian architect and furniture designer.

Life

Caccia Dominioni was born on 7 December 1913 in Milan, in Lombardy in northern Italy, to Ambrogio Caccia Dominioni, a lawyer, and Maria Paravicini; the family was a noble one, with origins in Novara, in Piemonte.

Caccia Dominioni graduated from the Politecnico di Milano in 1936, and opened a studio with two fellow-students, Livio and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni. He was in the Italian army during the Second World War, but when the puppet Republic of Salò was established in 1943, he refused to recognise it and fled to Switzerland. After the war he returned to Milan and, with Corrado Corradi Dell'Acqua and Ignazio Gardella, started Azucena, a company which designed both furniture and furnishings such as door-handles and lamps.

Work

Caccia Dominioni designed many buildings in Milan, notably overseeing the internal restructuring of the Biblioteca and the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.

In 1947, Caccia founded Azucena with Ignazio Gardella and Corrado Corradi for which he created hundreds of design objects including lamps and furniture. He received the Compasso d'Oro award several times, including for the "Cdo" chair, the Palini "T.12" school chair (1960), and the Super door (1984). . From 1965 there were numerous collaborations with Francesco Somaini, such as in Milan for the renovation of the former Verziere, now Largo Marinai d'Italia - Formentano park, where Caccia invited the sculptor to study the suitable monument with him.

The eighties continue with the Monticello complex (begun in the seventies), that of Morbegno with the church of San Giuseppe, the arrangement of the elevated pedestrian paths of the Milan Fair.