Giancarlo Mattioli and Gruppo Architetti Urbanisti Città Nuova

Born in 1933 in Bologna, Giancarlo Mattioli was an Italian designer, architect, urban planner, portraitist, man and intellectual, who achieved success during the Fifties and Sixties. A student at the art school, he never stopped cultivating the passion for drawing with the edge of the pen handed down to him by his teachers. He graduated in architecture in Florence and in 1961 founded the "Città Nuova" Group of Urban Architects together with Pierluigi Cervellati, Umberto Maccaferri, Franco Morelli, Gianpaolo Mazzucato and Mario Zaffagnini.

In 1965, with the Gruppo Architetti Urbanisti "Città Nuova" he took part in the competition "Studio Artemide Domus di Milano", through which Artemide and Editrice Domus wanted to discover new ways of conceiving the lamp as a luminous object.

The project presented is a lamp inspired by the shape of a jellyfish, where Mattioli and the Group's professionals have worked on new ways to obtain discreet ambient light, with a fixture that makes you forget the presence of the bulb.

The project was the winner and the lamp was put into production in 1967 under the name Nesso; turns out to be an emblematic icon of those years and has a long fortune, evidenced by the fact that it is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York.

Designer of modern classics, Mattioli is not afraid to think outside the box: an intellectual with an authentic civil passion, he is also the technician who has signed historic urban plans for the Municipality of Bologna since the end of the 1960s. He was called there by the then councilor Giuseppe Campos Venuti, and he remained there, in force and at the top of the technical offices, without interruptions until 1999: he participated in the plan for the historic center and in the plan for the hill, in the plan for the industrial zone, to the master plan of 1985-89, to the new railway junction.

He passed away in 2018 at the age of 85.