Italy is Hong Kong's partner country for this year's Business of Design Week. Over the next several months, we'll be introducing you to some of the designers and projects that will be highlighted at the BODW Summit in December. This month, we're starting with an icon of Italian design: Michele De Lucchi. 

 

For someone who lives in the Italian countryside and works in Milan, Michele De Lucchi is no stranger to Hong Kong. Over the past year, the renowned architect and designer has delivered three lectures and presented two exhibitions here, and he is set to return again for the 2025 Business of Design Week in December.  

 

“Hong Kong is a very special city. Unique in the world,” says De Lucchi via Zoom, as he sits in his rural house about an hour’s drive from his Milanese studio. He has been visiting for a number of years, thanks to locally-based friends and connections with the Hong Kong design community, and the city’s charm has never worn off.  

 

“There is a peculiarity of the city that is very attractive to me,” he says. “I am always looking for peculiarity. It’s a city open to any kind of trade, with such an unbelievable location and geographical position in between the ocean and the jungle. All of this on a tiny piece of land. It’s wonderful.” 

Peculiarity is a defining trait of De Lucchi’s career. Some know him for the tiny wooden houses he carves with a chainsaw. Others are familiar with the furniture and lighting he has designed for the Italian design brands like Artemide. But many more are familiar with the Memphis Group, which De Lucchi co-founded with Ettore Sottsass and several other architects in 1981.  

 

“The Memphis Group had a profound impact on the design world that continues to resonate today,” says William Figliola, founder of the Novalis Art Design gallery on Hollywood Road, which specialises in Italian art and design with roots in the Memphis Group. 

 

“Memphis for me was very important and also in some ways very dangerous,” says De Lucchi. “If I knew Memphis would be so important and its influence would spread around the world, I would have been much more attentive about what I was doing. It was not a time of strategies and planning and timetables. We were just enthusiastic about doing something.” 

 

What they were doing was upending many established notions of design. For six years, the Memphis Group produced wild postmodern furniture, fabrics, carpets, ceramics, lighting and other objects, with loud colours and asymmetrical forms. “Memphis designers often combined unconventional materials, such as plastic laminate and metals, to create unique pieces,” says Figliola. It was a deliberate rejection of the formal minimalism, balance and restraint that had defined decades of Modernist design – a joyous and seemingly chaotic expression of an era that celebrated innovation and excess.  

 

Some were horrified. But many others were enthralled. Davie Bowie became an enthusiastic collector of Memphis works, praising their “visceral” impact. “Memphis was a firework,” wrote design critic Rowan Moore in 2020. “Memphis never sought immortality, nor the establishment of eternal verities to rule design for ever. It was about life lived in the moment — to the extent that inanimate objects can communicate such a thing — about the freedom to create and make mistakes.” 

Moore was specifically writing about an exhibition of Memphis objects at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. That coincided with a revival of interest in the design group’s work, not only by scholars and curators but by contemporary designers. “Maximalism is back in fashion,” declared online design magazine Dezeen in 2019, and for the past decade, many designers have made deliberate references to the Memphis aesthetic in their work. 

 

“The Memphis Group is known for its striking use of bright colours, geometric patterns and playful forms,” says Figliola. “Today, many designers incorporate these vivid aesthetics into their work, embracing color and pattern as a means of expression. This has led to a resurgence of maximalism in various design fields, from interiors to fashion.” 

 

But the real influence of Memphis goes beyond style. “The emphasis on fun and creativity in Memphis design encourages contemporary designers to explore the playful side of design,” notes Figliola. “This manifests in designs that prioritise imagination and humour, breaking away from the seriousness often associated with modernism. Designers today freely mix styles, eras, and cultural references, resulting in eclectic and personal expressions in their work. 

 

“The Memphis Group [also] emphasised design as a means to foster experiences and emotions rather than strictly adhering to functionality. This approach has influenced modern designers to consider the emotional impact of their work, prioritising user experience and interaction.” 

 

Carmelo Ficarra, the Italian consul general in Hong Kong — who has been instrumental in facilitating creative exchanges between the city and Italy — says one of the most remarkable aspects of De Lucchi's work "is his ability to seamlessly integrate design with storytelling and context," drawing from culture, history and personal experiences. He also points to Ficarra's emphasis on sustainability and human-centred design as a point of overlap with many designers in Hong Kong. 

 

For his part, Figliola sees traces of Memphis in the bold colours and playful spirit of local lifestyle brand Goods of Desire (G.O.D.), as well as in the work of artist and designer Stanley Wong, who “shares that same celebratory and eclectic spirit” as Memphis even if his work does not reference it in a specific formal way.  

 

“I have been a huge fan of Memphis from day one,” says G.O.D. founder Douglas Young. “I was at boarding [school] when they burst into the scene. I wrote to them and they sent me their first ever catalogue which I have kept ever since. I appreciate their dry humour which is rare in high design. Most other designers always try to be cool and serious. So Memphis is a breath of fresh air for me.” 

The Memphis Group disbanded in 1987. “Its ice-cream colours, its doo-wop-Mesopotamian-Picasso-deco-iconic-ironic wonky eclecticism had, by the time it wound down, become a cliché of advertising agency reception areas and the style of homes of the evil rich in Hollywood comedies,” wrote Moore. But its spirit of rebellion, experimentation and joyful extravagance lives on – which is the legacy that De Lucchi thinks is most important.  

 

“The zeitgeist has changed,” he says. (“I like to say it in German because it means ‘the ghost of time’ and that’s wonderful, just imagine it,” he adds.) “In the 1980s we weren’t talking about ecology and resources and all these dramatic issues. We were much more enthusiastic about California. When Steve Jobs was working in his garage to create the first Mac, you know when it was? In ’81. The same year we did Memphis. It was created in the same year and in the same context. It was a time of good vibrations.” 

 

Memphis was born on a boozy, smoky evening of feverish conversation between architects. Its name was inspired by Bob Dylan’s song “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” which had been playing on a loop all evening “because we got so excited we forgot to change the record player,” says De Lucchi.  

 

The atmosphere spoke to the architects’ main concern at the time: “The issue was the environment, not in terms of the natural environment, but in terms of relationships and feeling good and motivated.” Crucially, says De Lucchi, the group wanted to project an optimistic, forward-thinking approach to design, one that embraced human connections, human touch and human foibles.  

 

“Now the big difference today is that I have this anxiety so deep inside me I cannot take it out,” says De Lucchi. “Even to talk about creating a new world, new environment, new architecture is…” He trails off. Though the 1980s saw their share of conflict, the mood was decidedly less dour than it is today, as we are faced by climate change, political polarisation and a pervasive sense that things are getting worse, not better. 

 

“Today we have to be more conscious about what we do. We no longer have this mental freedom,” says De Lucchi. But he thinks the greatest lesson from Memphis is to face the future with a sense of hope and anticipation, not dread. “To think about the future in a pessimistic way is dangerous,” he says. “The language of Memphis as a figurative style is the part of it that is less [relevant] today. But what is still very updated about Memphis is the need to look forward. The need for imagination. The need for an environment that fits our time. The need to be a rebel and not to accept that it’s not allowed to criticise.” 

De Lucchi’s own work since Memphis maintains the group’s playfulness and inquisitiveness, even if it is formally distinct – fewer strange forms and bright colours. “One of the most admirable aspects of his work is his emphasis on the relationship between design, architecture and the user experience,” says Figliola. “He often seeks to create environments and products that foster human connections, reflecting a deep understanding of how people interact with their surroundings.” 

 

That can be seen in De Lucchi’s architectural work, notably the topographically-inspired main pavilion at the 2015 Milan Expo, but also in his products and artworks. He says that, if there were a new version of Memphis today, the main orthodoxy it would challenge would be “the separation between the manual way of doing and the industrial way of doing.”  

 

That and simply offering an opportunity to poke fun at established ways of doing things. De Lucchi says that is partly the motivation for using a chainsaw to craft his sculptures, some of which were exhibited at Novalis at the end of 2024.  

 

“I did that because I wanted to provoke,” he says. “This is another concept that fits with the Memphis philosophy. Provoke, but in a nice way, in a way where you don’t feel like you’re fighting, you don’t feel violent. Provocation is wonderful if it’s like that, if a provocation is inspiring and transmitting a positive sense of testing and doing. Memphis was like that.” 

 

At "Italian Design Day 2025" in Hong Kong, Michele De Lucchi delivered an inspiring Design Talk titled 'Curiosity is Evolution' at the DX design hub. He will return this December to speak at the Business of Design Week (BODW) Summit 2025, sharing further insights. 

 

Writer: Christopher DeWolf 

  

This column is produced in partnership with Zolima CityMag, an online magazine that explores Hong Kong’s arts, design, history and culture.