Achille Castiglioni

Achille Castiglioni (; 16 February 1918 – 2 December 2002) was an Italian designer of furniture, lighting, radiograms and other objects.
Life.
Castiglioni was born on 16 February 1918 in Milan, in Lombardy in northern Italy. He was the third son of the sculptor Giannino Castiglioni and his wife Livia Bolla. His elder brothers Livio and Pier Giacomo were both architects.
Castiglioni studied classics at the in Milan, but switched to study the arts at the Liceo artistico di Brera. In 1937 he enrolled in the faculty of architecture of the Politecnico di Milano. When the Second World War broke out, he became an officer in the artillery, and was stationed on the Greek front and later in Sicily. He returned to Milan before the Allied Invasion of 1943. In March 1944 he graduated from the Politecnico.
When the War was over, Castiglioni joined the architectural design practice that his brothers Livio and Pier Giacomo had started with Luigi Caccia Dominioni in 1938. Much of their work was in exhibition design, but they also carried out a number of architectural projects, including the reconstruction in 1952–53 of the , which had been destroyed by bombing in 1943.
Livio Castiglioni left the practice in 1952. From then until Pier Giacomo died in 1968, he and Achille worked as a team; their designs are not attributable to either one of them. After the death of Pier Giacomo, Castiglioni worked alone. From 1969 he taught architectural and design subjects, first at the Politecnico di Torino, and then, from 1980 when he became an "ordinario" or full professor, at the Politecnico di Milano.
Achille Castiglioni died on 2 December 2002 in Milan.
Work.
The Castiglioni brothers designed the Lierna chair – an upright dining-chair in lacquered wood with a slightly padded plywood seat – for Cassina in 1960.
In the exhibition brochure for "Design!, the 1997 monographic exhibition about Castiglioni's work at MoMA" Paola Antonelli writes: "Castiglioni loves paradoxes and the new perception and wisdom they can engender. One example is the Sella (saddle), the pivoting stool designed with Pier Giacomo in 1957, which garnered the Castiglionis an incongruous "Dadaist" label because of its use of an already existing, everyday object in an unexpected context."