Sergio Mazza (1931-), Italian architect and designer, played an important role both in the industrial history of Italian design and in that of its intellectual dissemination.

In 1959, together with the aeronautical engineer Ernesto Gismondi, he founded the “Artemide” brand in Milan, a company specializing in lighting fixtures.

Despite the artisanal start – in the small space of the company in via Moscova the lamps are worked by metalworkers and glassmakers, and the first catalog contains only six models – the beginnings prove to be profitable: in a short time Artemide establishes itself as one of the most qualified brands in its sector. Collaborations begin with designers and architects such as Magistretti, BBPR, Gio Ponti, Livio Castiglioni, and the foundations are laid for its future expansions.

Mazza signed many of the first lamps produced by Artemide and accompanied the company in the first experiments on the nascent plastic furniture market.

The design logic was based on the principle that functionality did not suffocate the formal figurative fact, so that even outside their functions, the objects had an aesthetic value.

The peculiarity of Artemide’s products of that time is that on the one hand they guaranteed the essential aesthetics and technologies of industrial design, but at the same time managed to express the Italian tradition, through the choice and sophisticated processing of materials.

In the 1960s, Mazza designed his most famous lamps for the brand, those in nickel-plated brass, opaline glass and crystal: from suspension lamps such as Delta and Tau to the Clio wall light, from the Sigma ceiling lamp to the Alfa table lamp. Objects that today can be defined as cult and heritage of prestigious international museums.

In 1961 he founded the SMC Architettura studio together with Giuliana Gramigna (1929-2016), with whom he would work throughout his life. In addition to Artemide, the two designed lamps for Quattrifolio, furnishings for Cinova and handles for Olivari, but linked their name above all to a major publishing initiative: in 1966 they founded and edited the magazine Ottagono, one of the important magazines in the world of furniture and design.
Ottagono will be awarded by ADI with the Compasso d’Oro in 1979, Mazza and Gramigna directed it for over twenty years, until 1988.

Among the various acknowledgments and prizes received, we recall the mention at the Compasso d’Oro 1960 for the Delta lamp by Artemide and the silver medal for the Italian apartment at the X Triennale in Milan.