Melchiorre Bega was as an Italian architect and designer who has come to define the urban and domestic worlds that we inhabit today. Born into a design family, who ran the company Vittorio Bega & Figli in Bolonga, they specialised in manufacture and restoration of furniture. Melchiorre, along with his siblings were trained up in the family business and he started his career there after completing a degree from the Fine Arts Academy in Bologna. He quickly made a name for himself in the compan
y and started designing the interiors of fashion stores, bars and cafes. One of his signature creations in the 1920s was the ingenious design of a spiral staircase constructed using a plywood frame that could be adapted and reshaped to fit different specifications. An example of the staircase still stands in the Motta Cafe on the Piazza del Duomo in Milan.
While his work may have seemed radical when first introduced in design magazine Casabella and described by the art critic Raffaelle Giolli as 'understated rationalism' and Novecento style, it came to be synonymous with the post-war periods in Italy. In the decade following the first world war, the two main schools of thought for design in Italy at the time were Rationalism and Novecento. Though they differed in approach they both sought out a return to classic Italian forms, stripped of excess and the overly decorative aesthetic of Art Deco and Art Nouveau.
Bega went on to design numerous hotels and public buildings in Italy and around Europe and America. While many of his interiors have been altered or changed entirely, his vision and craftsmanship lives on in these buildings and in the individual items of furniture which have become highly sought after collectors items.
Read more
