I am proud to have known - and called to collaborate with me to my Donna magazine - Giulio Cappellini since the 80s. A friendship and a long-lasting creative relationship that has also been very important for Superstudio and the launch of the Design Week diffused over the Tortona District, also thanks to his courage and intuitions. Architect, art-director, designer, talent-scout, trend-setter esteemed in the international field, besides being a professional and exquisite man, he has just received the greatest Italian award in design that is the Compasso d’Oro for his career. Nothing more deserved.

With his long view and his sensitivity, at the first visit of what General Electric in March 2000, a factory just emptied and delabrée, a young Giulio Cappellini immediately understood that this space could host the headquarters of a revolution in the world of design and its representation. A month before the Salone del Mobile at the Fair of that year, he cancelled everything and moved here, in the rising Superstudio Più, a gigantic exhibition from the latest production of his family business Cappellini that kept following contemporary from a cutting-edge perspective thanks to him.
He brought with him other young people in fibrillation, little known or even unknown names at that time: Philippe Starck, Piero Lissoni, Tom Dixon, Fabio Novembre, Jasper Morrison, Paola Navone, Nendo ... who found a large square in which to express their vision in a total freedom, by Giulio stimulated and enlarged. The design turns thus into shows, culture, emotion, research. The rest is known history: the Cappellini factory and brand evolve and transform, Giulio is called as a consultant all over the world, but he remains equally next to us as artistic director of the Design Week event - with only a few short off-periods of time - for twenty years in which the friends of the early days became the undisputed stars of design and he the art-director multitasking that all companies would have had and who knows exactly how to understand who and what will be successful and who not. While Giulio's company puts the out-of-the-ordinary furniture by his recent discoveries into production he kept making his own pieces, always elegant and linear. His belief was in quality, his aesthetic was simplicity, his measure the diversity. Whatever he did. The career Compasso d’Oro rewards a certainly unique path, having Giulio been able to face the complexity of today's design thinking about himself but also identifying himself into others, in a competent and generous balanced vision. Such, in my opinion, to deserve some important public office, on the command bridge. To the motivation of the ADI organisation: "The path of Giulio Cappellini is a continuous reading and reinterpretation of the evolution of design capable of projecting it into the world of contemporaneity through his poetic vision as much as the personal relationship with the young talents supported by him" he thanks commenting: “A great passion accompanies me, a great desire to work but above all the thought that there is still a lot to do in design, it is not true that everything has been designed. Our task is to create useful and beautiful objects, however, as the great Castiglioni said, it is also to make people smile and dream. "
I, with all the Superstudio, thank him from the deep of the heart.