David Dolcini,Conversi,ph. David Dolcini Studio
The Value of Time: A Meditative Approach to Design
October 18 2022
Now joining the Triennale Collections is a section of David Dolcini’s Conversi project, composed of eight unique hardwood pieces created for the Premio Impresa e Valore awarded by the Milan Monza Brianza Lodi Chamber of Commerce.
David Dolcini, a designer from Codogno working in Spain and Italy, has an approach to design characterized by a deep interest in the technical aspects accompanied by his study and knowledge of materials and production technologies based on cross-disciplinary research ranging from art to architecture, from crafts to industrial design. David’s particular vision of the discipline of design has developed from his diverse personal, educational and professional experiences over the years in Italy and abroad. Also influential has been the Dolcini family’s long tradition of craftsmanship and woodworking. Beginning in 2020, these natural proclivities led him to undertake a period of study, research and experimentation – without abandoning his work as an industrial designer - which manifested in the Timemade project, through which he explored and adopted a meditative approach to design.
Timemade, design project. Photo: Mattia Balsamini
The result is a composite group of predominantly wooden objects – organized in independent collections – conceived at a pace far from the accelerated timing imposed by industrial production and actually created by working on a series of details including joints, couplings, grafts and balances between the parts. His aim with this research, pursued through direct experience taking on the challenge of the potential and limits of the material, is to reappropriate confidence with working manually and creating on a human scale.
Materials, designs and tools. Inside, the use of time.
Dolcini describes his project in these terms. He continues, “Timemade is a return to things. To the appropriate time of things. To things made of time, to time made with things. Underlying the project is the idea that there is an appropriateness between materials and form that can only be grasped by a sensibility born of the confidence gained through the actual time of making. Timemade is the experience of a slow pace of design; it requires a certain lightheartedness that is only gained by practicing the paths of the materials.
David Dolcini, Timemade. Photo: Mattia Balsamini
There is a certain naturalness in being able to see and perform a cut, in knowing which forms can interact in playful harmony. Keep in mind that wood is in and of itself a matter of growth and processing and time. It is not just about forms, but also botany and morphology. Thus a graft represents one way in which forms, times and tools join forces. It is a way of understanding design: grafting the respective times, materials, tools and forms, knowing when to take a break, when to slow down and when to quit. And only at the end will you perhaps recognize its use. A coincidence that, like attention to time-thought, rearticulates the experience and finds other affinities.”
Conversi, woodworking detail. Photo: David Dolcini Studio.
These principles inform the Conversi collection. This part of the Timemade project is composed of eight unique awards commissioned of David Dolcini by the Triennale Milano and conceived to represent the values identified by the Milan Monza Brianza Lodi Chamber of Commerce for the 2022 Edition of the Premio Impresa e Valore. They refer to the so-called “cohesive enterprises”, that is, businesses capable of acting in cohesion with the territory in which they operate and the community to which they belong, increasing their competitivity with an eye to sustainable development.
Conversi collection. Photo: David Dolcini Studio
Each piece of the prize expresses this concept of cohesion and conversion – that is, a tendency, while coming from different origins, towards a single point – through the graphic, organic bond between two intersecting, vertical hardwood volumes, or, to use the lexicon of agronomy, grafted with one or more transverse volumes. This results in a unified form, handmade by the author, in which the identity of its individual elements is preserved. To further tighten the bond between the prize and the territory it represents, the carefully-chosen wood for each piece of the collection is obtained from the same walnut tree in Lombardy.
Conversi, sample part of the Triennale Collections. Photo: David Dolcini Studio.
