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Bruno Monguzzi
Bruno Monguzzi was born in Tessin, Switzerland, in 1941. He studied in Geneva and London from 1956 to 1961, before joining Studio Boggeri in Milan, where he worked from 1920 to 1963. Since then he has combined commissions for graphic, editorial and exhibition design with teaching positions in Venice, Lugano and New York. In 1971, Monguzzi received the Bodoni prize for his contribution to Italian graphic design and he became a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale in 1979. he lives in Meride, Switzerland, travelling to Milan to work as art consultant for Anitare magazine. A typographer of the most exacting precision, Monguzzi has developed a graphic language untouched by the passing whims of fashion.
Valentino Boffa: Your childhood seems to have been a struggle for perfection influenced on the one hand by your Catholic mother and on the other by your Marxist father, a craftsman. Later you went to work with Antonio Boggeri in Milan and learned from him that perfection is never enough. tell me about your educational journey from the time you left Switzerland to the time you returned.
Bruno Monguzzi: I went to school, got a proper craftsman's trainning, was confronted with different private gospels , and found out at my expense that a graphic design course, even in Switzerland, had little to do with communication. My ‘whys’ were not getting enough proper answers and foor a kid looking for a universal language this became too frustrating. I left for London where I selected a few courses: Romek Marber’s at St Martin’s, Dennis Bailey’s at Central, photography at the London School of Printing. Thanks to Ken Briggs, whom I had also met at St Martin's and who tried to answer my many questions, I discovered Gestalt psychology and became very involved in the study of visual perception. It is at that point, in 1961, that I started to believe in graphic design as a problem-solving profession rather than a problem-making one and that I slowly began to push away my hidden dream to became another Werner Bischof. It was also at the time tha I began to understand and to love the American school: Gene Federico, Herb Lubalin, Lou Dorfsman, Lou Danzuger, Charles and Ray Eames.
VB: How did your study in psychology and perception influence your approach to graphic design?
BM: The study of perception provided the key to a less subjective reading of my own work. Most of what we get from looking at our own projects is in our mind to start with, not on the paper itself. The study of perception enabled me to construct a more objective, natural, direct view of communication – more objective because it is built up according to laws of perception that you can share without being a designer.
VB: What made you go to Milan?
BM: In the second issue of Neue Grafik I discovered the Milanese pioneers – Studio Boggeri, Max Huber, Franco Grignani – and I decided to fly to Milan to meet Antonio Boggeri. I still remember the tiny elevator of 3 Piazza Duse. On the slow, shaky journey up to the sixth floor I felt uneasy. And i felt uneasy for the following two years, having fallen in love with the man, his ideas, the designs of Aldo Calabresi and the office with the balcony overlooking the Giardini. After as few weeks of desperate struggle to be good enough to stay there, I was called for. Lifting his lean, long hands – the most beautiful hands I have ever seen – Boggeri shared with me his theory about the spider’s web. Like the spider’s web, he said, Swiss graphic design was perfect, but often of a useless perfection. The web, he stated, was only useful when harmed by the entangled fly. It was then that my vocabulary began to increase. And it was then that my use of type and pictures began to grow towards more expressive solutions …
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