dario antonioni

By the age of 10, Dario Antonioni was a bona-fide flight junkie, churning out model airplanes like a man obsessed. While other kids were memorizing baseball statistics, Antonioni was devouring every book about the Wright Brothers he could get his hands on. Even then, Antonioni was amazed not so much by that first flight itself—but by the fact that that two nobody bicycle mechanics had the effrontery to revolutionize a field so far beyond their area of expertise that they almost had no business being there. “They were the kind of innovators who didn’t follow a standard path,” says Antonioni. “They cleared a totally new path—even if it meant they didn’t know where they’d end up, and they were unwilling to allow any barrier stop them. To me, that’s what innovation is about.” Today, the founder of the Los Angeles design lab Orange22 still takes his cue from those aviators, refusing to abide by the often fiercely guarded distinctions between disciplines in design. He calls himself a “maker of things”—a purposefully open-ended description, as Orange22 designs and fabricates both mass-market and limited-edition objects and furniture, brand-defining retail environments, residential interiors and design concepts licensed for mass production. In every case, Antonioni fuses technology, art and design, with the overarching intent to revolutionize the way we live. With its aerodynamic lines, his furniture design often anticipates the future, leveraging advances in technology just slightly before they enter the mainstream. Those qualities hint at a designer with expertise in a field few designers can claim even cursory knowledge: And in fact, Antonioni’s first stop in higher education was the University of Michigan, where he studied aerospace engineering for several years. When that mostly theoretical science left him longing to work with his hands, Antonioni moved on to receive his industrial design degree from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he currently teaches the next generation of innovators. Antonioni’s work has been featured in magazines like GQ, In Style, Interior Design, Metropolis and Wallpaper, while Surface Magazine paid Antonioni tribute as a featured designer in its prestigious T.A.G. Event—a showcase of exceptional design talent—in New York and Milan. He’s exhibited his furniture at the most important international design shows in New York, Paris, Cologne and Milan, and has lectured at universities and industry conferences worldwide.