Prototipo Studio – provoking Italian manufacturing as much as you can
Italian, natural, plant-based supply chain – from farm field to weaving: the transparency of Made in Italy that wants to be not just a label, but a value
Prototipo Studio: Natural and plant fibers
Prototipo studio. Under the microscope, a natural fiber, whether animal or plant – wool, hemp, cotton, even silk – shows a morphological roughness. It will function as friction by providing a mutual grip in twisting, then spinning, and will improve stability.
None of this subsists for synthetic or extrusion fibers – nylon, polyester, any viscose even from natural matter –, appearing completely smooth under the microscope. Prototipo Studio works with natural fibers only: among these, the noblest one is hemp. Natural fibers are rough – on this word rough, Prototipo Studio has defined its own aesthetic.
Architecture of the second half of the twentieth century: Gio Ponti, Giovanni Muzio, the BBPR studio of the Torre Velasca
Our reference goes back to those architects who worked in Milan, in the 1950s and 1960s. Fascism had just demolished the bourgeois and working-class buildings of the second half of the Nineteenth century to make way for new streets, wide and arcaded, designed by volume even before by lines. On a new layout that seemed almost a reset, exploded what was called the ‘miracle’ of Milan, to underline the best performance of the Italian economic boom.
The gutting of the center was the havoc of a defeated dictatorial regime. Over this visceral void, energy exploded like fireworks. The architects of those years – Gio Ponti, Giovanni Muzio, the BBPR studio of the Torre Velasca – entered an intellectual conversation with the Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. A desk surrounded by books, newspapers – yet in order, from pencil sharpener to compass – to pantone box, to computer. The marks of women make up our abacus: Gae Aulenti, Cini Boeri, Gabriella Crespi.
An architect’s hand when drawing: Prototipo Studio and the rough concept
An architect’s hand-drawing succeeds in giving a flavor, a context – the pressure of the pencil, the finishing details. Notes remain on the sides, errors are indications, no corrections are needed to undo them – nothing is erased. Light and dark define perspective and proportion, technical measurements. Axonometries – the shadow becomes a mathematical formula, in the drawing the displacement of the sun’s rays over the course of the day. Poetry becomes technique on the architect’s table. The structure of materials mixes with the porosity of paper. The graphene of the pencil rests on, etches and breaks through, the roughness of the sheet of paper.
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Our skin: flaws are only virtues
Roughness is in the human skin. In the flaws, in the hair and cellulite – there, from where we want to hide, is beauty. The muscles are neither sculpted nor trained. They are strong to hold you in an embrace, to load you on the shoulders and make you reach higher. Sports is an intellectual discipline, not a vanity, which we all crave. Sport remains a reference for our rough concept.
Man and woman – new definitions of masculinity and femininity
Man is no longer muscular, massive – slender, almost fragile. Muscle fibers exist and hesitate. The muscles almost always function without violence. The woman finds linearity in her features: the face is clean, disdains makeup, disdains combing. The fingers of the hands are free. A woman needs neither frills nor color – sensual in an androgyny that manifests itself on the surface, femininity is always a matter of complexity, never a pose.
Prototipo Studio: film photography
We shoot in analog film, for the pastiness of shadows and grain. The same pastiness of an adult skin, or a real body. There are no tricks, no post production – no more digital photography. A rough, sincere, bare and raw world – with few flashy colors, but with tones in balance, with many well-conjugated nouns – few adjectives, no superlatives, no rhetoric, no emphasis. Our language is rough.
Prototipo Studio: natural hemp for an Italian supply chain: Made and Sourced in Italy
From this rough world, Prototipo Studio is born: a research laboratory that finds its starting point from a natural, plant fiber – that is hemp. With the same care in design that an architect works on his drawing board, Prototipo Studio is working on hemp fiber: starting in agricultural fields, studying how the fibers should be harvested, cut at what points, and then going through the processes of scutching and steeping, cleaning and carding – all the way to spinning.
The result is a coarse yarn that gives a fabric with a hand similar to silk and cashmere. The softness increases with every contact with the moisture of the skin, with every wash at home without releasing microplastics into the water – and with every wash, hemp regains its backbone, and releases the same summer scent even after years, without ever giving it up.
The yarns and the textiles by Prototipo Studio are the output of a complete Italian supply chain – today, when in Italy we import all the raw materials of the textile industry from abroad. Made and Sourced in Italy shall become a new valuable code, higher than Made in Italy in terms of transparency, traceability, quality and sustainability.
Not only for the textile industry: Hemp is the only sustainable fiber for our better future
With hemp lime you will build the houses of tomorrow. With hemp you produce paper for both architects and painters. One hectare of hemp removes more Co2 from the atmosphere than one hectare of forest – if then, this hemp is used for long lasting purposes, this Co2 remains locked in our earthly contexts and will not return to the air. Hemp is planted to clean polluted soils in Puglia, South Italy, of heavy metals. Hemp, wood, soil – the roughness of an architect’s hand, of our human skin. This is the roughness of Prototipo Studio, which is a brainchild of Lampoon Magazine.
Carlo Mazzoni
