Prolific, versatile designer, Michele De Lucchi organizes his work into clearly defined periods that take shape along the path of his personal artistic trajectory. Rather than develop his career within a single design discipline—be it industrial, furniture, interior, lighting or architectural design—he chose to move freely among them all, creating door pulls for Valli Colombo, laptops for Olivetti, desk lamps for Artemide, and tape dispensers for Pelikan while designing exhibitions, banks in Germany, apartment buildings in Japan, assorted chairs, vases, and office furniture.

De Lucchi reminds one of Alexander Calder, if only in spirit, for the way in which his precisely engineered objects ally themselves with the young at heart through playful tectonics and the use of color. Unlike Calder, he has no consistent style that carries through his body of work. Brightly colored objects covered in bold, geometric patterns produced for Memphis in the 1980s—including Kristall, a table that resembles a four-legged pet—appear to be made by a different hand than the sleek, pristine Macchina Minima (Minimal Machine) he created with Mario Rossi for Produzione Privata in the 1990s. Yet each period is characterized by an intellectual rigor derived from De Lucchi’s early experimentation with conceptual art. The fact that one creation can be so stylistically different from another may also be attributed to the designer’s ability to collaborate with and learn from other artists.