I just had to see this staging by John Caird of Shakespeare’s ’A midsummer nights dream’ in a wintry Stockholm. The reviews were excellent. So many friends were enthusiastic. And it sure offered excellent actors. Especially that naughty Puck, and an enchanting stage design not the least. But what a linear adaption. Everything waiting in line to be shown and said. So far a way from that total experience Shakespeare was all about. Neither my mind nor my soul were seduced, instead they kept drifting away to a night in Perugia many years ago, where Lindsey Kemp Company bestowed the same play. But that was something completely different, an enticing fairy-tale set in a forest of naked bodies, dark trees, and lush nature displaying a life of its own in a scary moon-light, things happening everywhere. Admittedly quite some liberties were taken with the play where suddenly everybody fell in love with the wrong person. And the show didn’t end by the applause, but continued out on the street and in the clubs during the night, the actors happily drunk.

This hazy remembrance of bliss surfaces again when I stumbled on the works of Fabio. Whereas some designers still cling to the trivially obvious, Fabio’s poetic attitude is distinguished by a similar kind of search for a total experience as in the theatre when he invites you to his own imaginary landscapes. Instead of imposing one single narrative, he offers a palette of different sensorial teasers, where various stories are lurking around, awaiting discovery. He is yet another of these Italian designers who adheres to that Shakespearian quest for a total art, where all your senses are supposed to get caught, where the mind gets lost in imaginary worlds, where the present is so overwhelming immediate as to overturn and reconfigure past and future. This is once again the very aim of true opera d’arte, to enchant form and materials, having them acquiring a life of their own, needless of any interpretations. Instead of being merely another victim for consumist society, art, design, architecture is still supposed to state the big questions about life, challenging our conceptions of realities and virtualities. And this idealistic sensorial approach has to be defended in a time where flashy but empty minimalism prevails, postmodern irony still lives on, and where such uncanny obscurities as cognitive ergonomics makes their way.

And this voice from the South, all the way down to Lecce in Reggio Calabria, is once again an example of that unpredictable capriciousness of Italian design, to continuously surprise with another fuori serie. This fierce cried out self-assured individuality of Fabio is of course no exception, quite the contrary it is the rule. Italian designers doesn’t have to fight old styles and trendy isms, like their counterparts in other Western world countries, rather they are up challenging all these design-icons so plentifully piling up in Milan. The reason why Italian design never fails to surprise goes way back in history. And it is something more than a superb acquired sense for beauty and form. Although the renaissance was the birthplace of modernity, it never really got hold. When other countries adopted the modern project as a result of political revolutions, Italy got stuck with a modernity never grown up, its promising yet at the same time frightening aspects continuously questioned and quarrelled by futurists, metaphysicists, rationalists, arte povera, Alchimia, Memphis and others. The deep crisis of modernity were exposed earlier on than in many other countries, do recall Antonioni’s La Notte, and at least in the design area one was able to move ahead along new trajectories, with amazing results. While elsewhere the modern movement tried to reconcile industrial production and culture, in Italy they remained separate although benign counterparts. And this never made marriage, this very culture of crisis, has since the second world war been successfully exported all over the world under the name of Italian design and fashion. Although the names might not all be as big as the icons of American consumer society, that dreary fixed package without content called McDonald’s can hardly compete with the pizza when it comes to diffusion, an open concept, a project which is present and can be adapted everywhere.

There’s a ’I don’t care attitude’ which is quite caring in the works of Fabio. Preoccupied with sensorial qualities, he doesn’t give a damn of what other designers might think. He has left behind styles and names and manifests. He plows his own grounds, regardless of styles in vogue or if he might appear childishly ingenuous. And I certainly appreciate that straightforward naivistic attitude, the vivacious jumpy colours, this quest for tactility, this abhorrence of the perfect and ordered. Take the discotheque Atlantique in Milan: chairs as flowers, a rain of light over the bar, the androids made by Mutoid Vaste Company along the cat-walk. Or the illuminated plastics at Anna Molinari’s Bluemarine shop in Hongkong. Instead of being just another asset of Italian export, Fabio possess an individual voice capable to carry through the cacophony of contemporary design.

The first time we met was out at his studio-cum-living place at the periphery of Milan: light grey concrete floor lit by sunshine from the large industrial windows, a king-size bed hiding reluctantly behind some dividers, a couple of drawing-desks aligned discreetly along the window-sill, piled up loudspeakers, a Fender, and freak-out furniture, moulded plastic things, sofas spread out evenly. The work and living quarters of this city-nomad shared the only evaluating criteria seemingly relevant to Fabio: ones ability to lasciarsi mangiare, to be oneself fully and truly. And that pillow over in the corner with his own image with thorns and a fake halo over the words ’Be Your Own Messiah’ was hardly blasphemous, rather an agnostic belief in the power of oneself, not writing but being a manifest, in the spirit of a Joe Colombo, Verner Panton, Carlo Mollino. And all this flashy seriousness of the design-business was blown away, what it all boils down to is to express your love to humankind, nothing else. And there is undoubtely a spiritual dimension to the works of Fabio, like with many other Italians, being an atheist with faith, saying that we got to care about existential question rather than mere prosperity in the postindustrial world, building out of new utopias, but not perfect ones as in modernism, rather more fairy-taleish like in Shakespeare or the Invisible cities of Calvino. Myth takes precendence on progress, modernism gets relegated to the past, ending up as the opposite of what if promised, just a new classicism trapped in our neo-baroque time, a nostalgic memory of an utopia never come true.

What can then be said of Fabios inspiration then? Sure, the female body, soft supple curves in abundance, is present in all his designs, and he doesn’t shy away about it. Like that little poem written to convince the owners of Atlantique to hire him: ’Architecture is like a beautiful woman, you want her nude, sculptural in her most intimate and structural forms, perfectly true like a picture by Helmut Newton, with a fierce cried-out sexuality.’ But I guess that the natal year of Fabio being the magical 1966 is even more important. The Gute Form of Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm shut down, unable to cope with the spreading consumer society. Venturi published his lessons from Las Vegas. Andy Warhol launched Velvet Underground. Both Archizoom and Superstudio were founded, and in London Peter Cook presented his Amazing Archigram. So much of this spirit of the radical movement of the sixties, this full speed ahead, is alive in the works of Fabio. No wonder he regrets not living through all of it. But a reincarnate then?

The quest for a total art, for non-linear versatility, for ornament as an altruistic grace is mandatory in coping with the problems of a tehnology-driven consumer society, adding visual narratives which doesn’t extenuate the complexity of our time, but which adds new dimensions to discern. Mending the old with the new, industrial materials with handcrafted, with a fair amount of attention to details, Fabio’s designs amounts to something more than an answer to our contemporary craving for uniqueness in a society ever more bereft of quality and concern. What really matters is not the unique, but the rare, that which not only catch your eyes, but rewards you with an enthralling lasting impression, with new facets to apprehend. This has been a major theme in Italian design for ages, it can be said to constitute the very epic of it. But that the outcome of the sixties amounted mostly to the very personal Fabio readily accepts. His way to cope with mass industrial culture rejects any collective solutions, to crave for more freedom you must be ready to carry more responsibilities. And his conviction seems to imply that aesthetics carries deep ethical concerns, you can’t fulfil yourself in an ugly world. Rather than talking about the improvement of the globe, just do it, use your heart. And being a true progettista, he is convinced that professional titles are not the issue, since man himself is art, life itself is a work of art. It’s nothing else than a personal challenge to turn your work into an expressive medium.

It might astonish that Fabio is no master of drawings, his preferred tools is the word. But this doesn’t hinder him in his work, he believes in the energies of places, imagining in absence, and he finds his visions listening in to the ambience. Architecture is his chosen medium, what he calls the ultimate challenge of the three-dimensionality, the last medium to acknowledge that we are made of flesh and blood, that in the end there is only us. His spaces are little gems in the cityscape, made for emotions, for the burning of passions as well as for contemplation.

Ettore Sottsass himself claim that existence is sensorial, not mental. That’s at least one of the reasons why Fabio is so hot on our need of more sex. This obviously has deeper connotations than any Casanova, lost among the curtisans of Venice, never satisfied, wandering astray in the mediaeval city-grid, never ever succeeding in reconciling mind and body. Scrutinising these visual tidings Fabio present, might his ultimate dream be the ability to fathom the powers of man and nature, just like Prospero in Shakespeare’s ’The Tempest’? Not to have ones love cumbered by necessity to rely on technologies that tames, obscures and kills a person’s original passion. Instead being able to capture all the senses a person has, expressing in a single glance or caress feelings, dreams, forlorn pasts, expressing whims and wishes, ultimately oneself’s true being. Whatever the answer, there’s a tender loving in his works, not only creating architecture out of poems, but the building of poems.