For his first collaboration with Alessi, the Anglo-Canadian designer Philippe Malouin has conceived an espresso maker through an approach entirely unprecedented in the company’s history. Malouin’s work is renowned for its distinctive capacity for formal synthesis, which is nevertheless different from classic minimalism. On the contrary, his design language is made up of simple, primary geometries, often abruptly truncated and recomposed with the intuitive immediacy of a primordial gesture. This attitude places his practice at the threshold between design and art, where the act of assembling becomes a genuine expressive language. Malouin himself speaks of “Scrapyard Works,” a creative method that begins quite literally in a scrapyard. There, the designer selects fragments and metal offcuts and grants them new life through reconfiguration and reinterpretation. The Vite project originated with a visit to the Ossola metal scrapyard, where Malouin identified a series of archetypal forms and combined them into various formal proposals. From these studies, one configuration was chosen as the basis for development into the final product. Colour constitutes the second defining theme of the Vite collection. The coffee maker is offered in a palette of green, brick red and grey; chromatic variations derived from research conducted within the Alessi workshop, where the tones of machinery, tools and other elements of the factory environment were sampled and transformed into a refined colour system.
The Designer: Philippe Malouin
Born in Laval in 1982, Philippe Malouin is a London-based industrial designer whose work spans furniture, lighting, objects, installations, and art pieces. He founded his studio in 2008 and has taught at leading design institutions including the Royal College of Art in London and ECAL in Lausanne. Malouin has received international recognition, including awards from Wallpaper*. Archiproducts and Dezeen.
