Essay: On Nanda Vigo, the late trailblazing designer

From the debut volume of Capsule: International Review of Radical Design & Desire Theory, which launched at Milan Design Week this past summer.

Near the end of the 1971 giallo film The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, the white tile floors of a Nanda Vigo–designed interior provide a stark backdrop for a bloody femme-on-femme stabbing. In these lurid slasher flicks, a staple of Italian cinema in the 60s and 70s, transgression always leads to death, their mystery-horror storylines playing out the period’s anxieties over changing social codes, which were often paranoia around women choosing self-gratification over subordination. For design nerds, it’s Vigo’s furry spiral staircase that easily identifies the site of this gruesome attack as Lo Scarabeo sotto la Foglia, a villa in Vicenza built according to plans that Gio Ponti had offered free to anyone willing to realize them—in this case, an art collector who then hired Vigo to add her vision inside. Before the plot twist that sees them stained with gore, Vigo’s bright white interior seems to offer an optimistic future for the pair of schemers, who had just locked up a serial-killing lord and made off with his fortune.The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave was not the last time interiors designed by Vigo made their way onto the silver screen: Casa Blu was featured in Gang War in Milan (1973) and Casa Gialla in The Killer Must Kill Again (1975). Stylish architecture and design were key to how many films of the era aestheticized their transgressions, which in turn signaled the societal shifts triggering the collective unconscious. 

While these films played out anxieties about women asserting new roles in the 60s and 70s, Vigo exemplified the phenomenon. After studying architecture in Lausanne and then spending time in the US—where she found Frank Lloyd Wright a total disappointment with a “nasty temper”—Vigo returned home to Milan and, at the tender age of 23, opened her own atelier. It was 1959, and her hometown was the capital of Italy’s so-called “economic miracle,” the postwar shift from a poor rural agrarian society to a modern industrial power. These economic changes in turn prompted urban expansion and a cultural metamorphosis, which together set the stage for a period of radical experimentation in art, architecture, and design. In the turbulent years that followed, marked by labor uprisings and political terrorism, Milan saw taller skyscrapers, new nightclubs, and design collectives that pushed the boundaries of good taste.

A product of her times, there was a boldness to how Vigo broke convention in her practice. In 1970, when Tommaso Trini interviewed her for Domus about Lo Scarabeo sotto la Foglia, she proudly listed off the aspects of her interiors that were being criticized while also dragging her more predictable peers: 

A bed in the middle of the living room? Unhuman! A house with no doors? That’s crazy! And how about the ceramics and the neon lights? Absurd!’ Well, I do find more absurd the works of some of my colleagues who use their job as a sign of good behavior to impose their pseudo-artistic-consumerist products.

But even while she derided the bourgeois impulses of other designers, there was a contradiction to the kind of work she was doing. The unconventional design of domestic space was a way of rethinking social relations and the assumptions of the patriarchal nuclear family, but, at the same time, these radically modern interiors served as a status symbol for Italy’s new moneyed class. 

Vigo was far from naive. She took advantage of the opportunities afforded by rich art collectors, like Giobatta Meneguzzo in the case of Lo Scarabeo sotto la Foglia, who were willing to fund her interior experimentations, even if they might have been driven by vanity as much as progressive politics. In a 2003 interview, architect Franco Raggi accused Vigo of “imposing on the client a definitive, somewhat rigid vision,” to which she retorted, “We discussed these interiors for two years, and in the end, I convinced him, because this space interprets and welcomes the collector’s opportunity, for whom space is for works of art.” Vigo was obsessed with designing interiors that integrated artworks in uninterrupted dialogue with the architecture, rather than using paintings and sculpture as mere decor. Lo Scarabeo sotto la Foglia, for example, featured all-white geometric artworks by Lucio Fontana, Agostino Bonalumi, and Enrico Castellani.

There is a confrontational quality to Vigo’s shiny, synthetic, monochromatic futurism, its hard-edges softened some by her signature injections of fuzzy faux furs. While her early interiors were ascetic in their white palette, over the years she grew more playful with her use of blacks, yellows, blues, greens, and reds—though she never totally abandoned her knack for astringent color stories. With Vigo’s unyielding commitment to neon lighting, her interiors often resembled nightclubs more than conventional living quarters. Experimenting with how space could be illuminated was a lifelong preoccupation, reflected in her design of domestic space, as well as in the innovative lamps she conceived for Arredoluce and her fine art Chronotopi light sculptures. That she’d long been enamored by the Flash Gordon comics she had read as a little girl and the Enterprise spaceship from Star Trek is evident in the sci-fi aesthetics consistent throughout her six-decade-long career. Vigo claimed no one influenced her style. In figures like Ponti she felt she’d found someone just as unique and individualistic as she was, and that encouraged her to forge ahead. 

Even if by most accounts, Vigo was gutsy and brazen, animated by a surplus of conviction that allowed her to collaborate with some of the biggest names in art and design at the time, the amount of male chauvinism she endured should not be underestimated. Her jealous fiancé Piero Manzoni did not even want her making art. Before drinking himself to death in 1963 (Vigo refuted the popular narrative that he died of a heart attack), the irreverent artist best known for selling his own shit forbade his wife-to-be from wearing miniskirts and prohibited contact with artists from ZERO, the Dusseldorf-based movement in which Vigo had played a pivotal role. About tolerating the toxicity, Vigo later told Hans Ulrich Obrist (one of the last interviews she gave, published posthumously by PIN–UP) that she was absolutely in love and had accepted all of it. Accommodating this version of bossed Vigo with the other bossy ones, I think of a postmodern image from The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave: a striptease-artist-turned-aristocrat’s-second-wife, played by Marina Malfatti, walks by a fractured mirror panel in Lo Scarabeo sotto la Foglia, her figure abruptly duplicated and sliced. The shot foreshadows the pyramidal sculptures Vigo started making in the mid-70s, which used mirrors to shatter space in a series of luminous fragmented reflections, amplifying, as the artist put it, the “vibrations of the invisible world.” Throughout her work, Vigo understood and illuminated tension and contradiction.

While there were few women in her field, Vigo was by no means the only one. In the 70s, she crossed paths with Carla de Benedetti, who had carved out a niche as a photographer of architecture and interior design with her own Milan studio. De Benedetti worked with Vigo to document her interiors, including Casa Blu in 1971 and Vigo’s own Verona apartment in 1975, producing most of the photos seen here, which capture Vigo’s glossy yet forceful style with a strong point of view. Born only a few years apart, there were parallels in the women’s stories. Both lived childhoods disrupted by the Second World War—Vigo’s family had to evacuate Milan for Como, while De Benedetti’s family escaped arrest by the Gestapo by crossing the Alps by foot in the middle of the night. Both went on to study architecture (Vigo at the polytechnic in Lausanne and De Benedetti at one in Milan) and both completed degrees in Switzerland (after architecture, De Benedetti went on to study photography at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich). Like Vigo, De Benedetti had to deal in her own way with male chauvinism early on in her career—after documenting some furniture for one of her first clients, he refused to pay, saying something scornful about women. After De Benedetti successfully sued him, the magistrate’s verdict mentioned his disbelief that a gentleman would decline “so charming and beautiful a young lady!”

Though Vigo’s legacy still perhaps doesn’t match her influence (vaporwave lighting and furry accents have been everywhere for years), there have been major efforts of late to celebrate her contributions—from her exhibition of light and mirror installations at Sperone Westwater in 2015 (can you believe it took that long for Vigo to get a solo show in New York?) to her first retrospective in an Italian institution at Milan’s Palazzo Real in 2019. Vigo also contributed to the 2020 landmark Enzo Mari show at the Triennale Milano, which opened several months after her death, with an homage to Mari’s animal-shaped puzzle in the form of a neon-light menagerie. When they memorialize her, friends, colleagues, and admirers always seem to emphasize how her life and work was oriented by an intuitive freedom — a force, I’d add, that translates in her exacting illuminations as a sort of anti-gravity pull.