Lorenzo Palmeri, architect, deals with musical production and planning. His masters include Bruno Munari and Isao Hosoe. His projects won and were selected for some major prizes such as the Good Design Award and Adi Design Index.
What is your “rapport” with sound? How does it affect your work as architect and designer?
While attending the faculty of architecture, I have studied Composition for seven years and I’ve always done both jobs at the same time; I often skip from the music table to the architecture’s.
Do you follow the same planning model or do you change the approach according to the different contexts?
The planning attitude is the same, but one supplies the other with substantial inputs. The need of design for pragmatism becomes a basic element in music and the radical intangibility of music gives the architectural project some interesting spurs.
Sound and design have rejoined to all intents an purposes in Corista, the design for Caimi Brevetti, whom is this nomadic, acoustic component intended for?
Corista is used for sound modulation, at first meant for a segment of specialist users. Then we realized that it can be used in other fields, too: meeting rooms, home theatre, conference and workshop rooms.
How can one product meet so different requirements?
We started from Snowsound, a technology patented by Caimi; the first step was to emphasize the nomadic side through compressions, that create a hint of handle for an easier grip. Moreover several upgrade possibilities were taken into account. It’s a quite sophisticated product yet amazingly user-friendly.
So a sort of do-it-yourself acoustic project?
Experts are useful and often necessary, but sound is an esoteric field and a scientific answer alone doesn’t always provide a feed-back on one’s perceptive effect: you can’t measure the effect sound has on you. Corista enters this intangible and deeply private field and breaks the awe inspired by acoustics.
Are there any conceptual “contaminations” and shared elements in the different sectors you operate on?
I’m very interested in twinning, cooperation and forms of communications among different industries; the Salone will show the products StoneCircus I have designed for Stone Italiana together with other companies (Jannelli & Volpi, Nodus, Alpi, Agape and Moroso), that share a project combining and setting off several skills in a not competitive way.