Richard Sapper
Richard Sapper was born in 1932. After taking courses in philosophy, anatomy, and engineering, he graduated with a business degree from the University of Munich.
He began his design career in the design department of Daimler Benz in Stuttgart, before moving to Milan, where he worked first for the architect Gio Ponti, and then in the design division of "La Rinascente", a well-known store at the time. of being cutting-edge creative. In 1959, he also began to work independently, creating radios for Telefunken and watches for Lorenz. In the early 1960s, Sapper began collaborating with Italian architect Marco Zanuso, a partnership that would last for many years. Together, they acted as design consultants for Brionvega, an Italian electronics company, for which they developed a series of televisions and radios. In 1968, together with Pio Manzu and William Lansing Plumb, Sapper organized an exhibition on the limits of technology for the XIV Triennale. During the 1970s, Sapper was hired as a consultant on the development of experimental cars for FIAT and pneumatic structures for Pirelli, producing a concept car with a flexible skin designed to reduce impact in collisions. With Marco Zanuso he designed a transportable housing unit for the 1972 exhibition "Italy, the New Domestic Landscape" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the same year, Sapper formed a study group with the Italian architect Gae Aulenti to explore new transportation systems with the aim of reducing city center congestion, a theme to be developed for an exhibition at the Triennale XVI in 1979. Since 1980, Sapper has acted as chief industrial design consultant to IBM and later to Lenovo, overseeing the design of the company's personal computers worldwide. He created the design for the first ThinkPad laptop in 1992, as well as the long series of models that followed.
Sapper's main interest in his design work has been focused on technically complex problems. It has designed and developed a wide variety of products, ranging from boats and cars, to computers and electronics, to furniture and kitchen appliances. His clients include Alessi, Artemide , B&B Italia, Brionvega, FIAT, Heuer, Kartell, Knoll, IBM, Lenovo, Lorenz Milano, Magis, Molteni, Pirelli and many others.
Throughout his career, Sapper has remained deeply involved in academia, teaching at Yale University, the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, the Stuttgart Academy of Art, the Domus Academy in Milan, the Central Academy of Beijing Art and Design, the University of Buenos Aires, and the Royal College of Art in London, and teaching at universities around the world.
Richard Sapper has received numerous awards for his products, and his designs are represented in the permanent collections of museums internationally. He has been an honorary member of the Royal Society of Arts since 1988, and a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin since 2001. In 1992, he received the Sapper Lucky Strike Award from the Raymond Loewy Foundation for his design work. The German Design Council awarded him an Outstanding Achievement Award in 2009 , and he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina in 2010 . In 2012, Sapper was awarded the Merit Cross of the Order of Merit of the President of the Federal Republic of Germany.
