This is the story of a family's intertwined stories and how their first artistic carpentry studio opened in 1860 has turned into an international company, the protagonist of Italian design for its doors and partition systems.
The meetings with architects and designers were crucial.
In the ‘60s, with Vico Magistretti, Anna Castelli Ferrieri, Marco Zanuso, Luigi Caccia Dominioni, young and emerging, Lualdi experimented with and made doors and windows for the homes they designed for the upper-middle-class families of Milan. It will be precisely the encounter with Caccia Dominioni, and the invention of the glossy lacquered door in polyester, that would determine the turning point in the company in those years.
Milan is and remains the heart of Lualdi. From here in the '80s it opens up to the world and arrives in the US and UK thanks to architects Carl Magnusson, design director of Knoll, and Emanuela Frattini, who favor the beginning of the internationalization process, and since then its continuous development.
Today and the future, designers Steve Leung, Andrea Boschetti from Metrogramma, Marco Piva, Piero Lissoni, Andrea Destefanis and Filippo Gabbiani from Kokai Studio and Philippe Starck talk about the film.
Through their words and those of the workers and collaborators, the reality of an industrial company, but still familiar, emerges that has managed to preserve the care, attention, sensitivity and humanity of the relationships of the times in which it was artisan manufacture.
What will the door of the future be like? Intelligent, interactive, invisible, architectural. Once the traditional idea of the door has been overcome as a simple dividing element, a barrier and connection between environments, research is oriented towards intelligent systems. Creativity, formal and typological research and new project visions are the stimuli for experimenting with innovative construction technologies capable of realizing the products of the future, with ecologically sustainable use of materials and resources.