Angelo Mangiarotti was born on February 26, 1921, in Milan. He graduated in architecture in 1948 from the Polytechnic University of Milan. He worked professionally in the U.S. between 1953 and 1954, where, among other things, he took part in the competition for the design of Chicago’s “Loop.” During his time abroad, he met Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Konrad Wachsmann. Returning from the U.S. in 1955, he opened his own studio in Milan with Bruno Morassutti, where he remained until 1960. In 1989, he founded Mangiarotti & Associates, based in Tokyo. From 1986 to 1992, he was Art Director at Colle Cristalleria. Alongside his professional activity—which included the publication of his work in books, trade magazines, and newspapers—he devoted himself to teaching at Italian and international universities. In 1953, he was a visiting professor of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago; in 1963–1964, he taught a course at the Higher Institute of Industrial Design in Venice; in 1970, he was a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii; in 1974, at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne; in 1976, at the University of Adelaide and the South Australian Institute of Technology in Adelaide; in 1982, he was an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Architecture in Palermo; in 1983, he was a substitute professor in the Chair of Composition at the Faculty of Architecture in Florence; in 1989–90, he was an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Architecture in Milan; in 1997, he was an adjunct professor in the postgraduate program in Industrial Design at the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Milan. He delivered numerous international seminars and lectures. Angelo Mangiarotti’s design activity, whose theoretical foundations were set out in the book “In nome dell’architettura” (In the Name of Architecture), published in 1987, sought to highlight the intrinsic properties of each object, since only “objective” design can be immune to abuses against users and become broadly recognizable. While the language of architecture is used to express a new man–environment relationship, Mangiarotti assigned a very special role to plastic research in his work as a designer. His studies, always carried out with full respect for the properties of materials, aimed to define the object’s form as a quality of the material. Mangiarotti passed away on June 30, 2012, in Milan.

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