Interview published by COMUNICAFFE'INTERNATIONAL
on May 13th, 2010
Reproduced for kind permission of www.Comunicaffè.com



THE TOTEM OF IT ALL

A conversation with architect Angelo Micheli.



Designing and manufacturing an attractive coffee machine may seem an easy task, but it is not – at least judging from the vast number of ugly coffee machines on the market. In fact, as coffee technology develops, technical and economic limitations tend to become overwhelming and finding new solutions becomes increasingly difficult. Now wonder it is hard to find an original machine; even more so to find one selected by a team of experts in industrial design, such as the Good Design jury.

The Good Design Award has been known to award the most brilliant designers of the last 50 years. And this creation of the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design has awarded last Dec. 2009 for its excellence an Italian machine: the Totem by Tuttoespresso.

It was not the only one. But, awaiting for the other winners to speak up, we have interviewed the only GoodDesign-awarded Italian Architect in the coffee machine section, Angelo Micheli – the creative hand behind Luca Majer’s Tuttoespresso – the hand that has drawn the winning “drinks center” Totem, a machine using exclusive, hi-tech capsules to prepare coffee, tea, chocolate and other hot drinks.


Comunicaffè: Assuming that the concept of “nice” bears any sense, do you consider your Totem the nicest coffee-machine ever?
Angelo Micheli: Frankly, I am not the one to ask such a question. As far as I’m concerned, that is as a project, the Totem is the nicest machine of them all. But it’s a personal and biased judgement.

CC: When did you design it?
AM: I recall when I first discussed the project with Luca Majer and he asked me to design their new HoReCa machine. It was March 2008. Luca wanted a symbolic machine, bearing historical references, something similar to the first espresso machines, in early ‘900. We even talked about the machine that Gio Ponti drew in the 40’s and we joked about the quarrels the designer had with his industrial counterpart: Ponti trying new ways and La Pavoni’s team giving him a hard time. The task was to draw a sign that would symbolize a totem, but with softer shapes, well-balanced lines yet with some extravagant touch. When we parted he shook my hand and said: “Do dare, Angelo”.
Just a few weeks later Luca calls me up and says “What’s going on, Angelo?” and I go “Well, not much.” Luca was writing about his Junghian interpretation of espresso, one of its own to appear on his book on coffee. No wonder he had hoped I had already some design solutions for this early XXI Century Totem coffee-machine. But I did not.
Actually I was in the South of France, working under a cloudy, end-of-the-winter kind of sky. Perhaps I simply took advantage of that dark day: fact is that I invented the Totem concept on that gloomy day. Relatively small, but taller than traditional espresso-bar machines, there was my Totemina, “the small totem”.
The initial inspiration was an old espresso machines, with a cyindrical footprint developing on a vertical axis topped by an eagle, and some flavour from the later horizontal espresso machines of the ‘50s. We couldn’t manufacture a capsule machine exactly with those historic forms (nor we wanted to), yet the shape of those early espresso machines was a stimulating one to be used as a guide-line.

CC: Some manufacturer still successfully use those eagle, these days.
AM: Sure. My choice was instead to design a sleek machine easy to remember with some state-of-the-asrt brewing technology under some nice looks. If the starting idea was a round shape, the project rapidly steered into using an ellyptical footprint. It was a shape that would allow the machine to have two sides: one rounder and one thinner. At the end if you look at the finished object, it almost seems as if the shape is quite regular, regardless to your point of view.
Then we had the symbolic sphere. And I chose a small tree - with two functions. First- rightly - it is a symbol, whatever meaning you want to give to it, Junghian or environmental or poetic. But secondly that tree also tends to accumulate the heat and deliver it to the cups that may be hung to its branches. Also, another nice thing about it is that the machine changes color accordingly to the the cups you use. If you hang cups that have roses printed on them, then the tree becomes a rose tree. Or a daisy tree, if you use cups with daisies. And so on.

CC: How did you develop that idea?
AM: I thought about the radiators of cars, with their facets to increase heat exchange surfaces. Hence this tree had to take heat from the heat plate on top of the Totem: a tree reconnecting with the machine, to conjugate a more familiar sign with the one of a mechanical object.

CC: It is so unique that nobody had thought about it in 100 years. How did the idea hit you?
AM: I thought of, I wanted a technical machine, because when a coffee machine is nice but makes a bad coffee, that’s “no good”. But the “excellent-coffee-making” function was performed by the bottom part of the unit. Above it there could be a tree: an almost frivolous décor, yet it has a purpose and furthermore it breaks one untold - yet immutable - code of coffee-machine designers: lots of technique and very little romance. Because the tree, after all, is romantic in its own way: it reminds of nature, of the earth. The tree even recalls the plantations where coffee is born.

CC: A coffee tree!
AM: Surely you can see it that way. My statement is: we can make a black-and-white machine which is relatively low-cost – a machine with low production costs. In spite of this the tree on top, literally, allows you to constantly change the looks of our machine: you just need to change the cups. It all depends from the creativity of the user, which can imprint his or her own spirit to both the machine and the tree. The machine’s design is finally made by the cups!

CC: A chamaleonic machine, one of the few thought to express a style function. The other coffee-machine thought for style is, perhaps, Illy’s Francis Francis, designed by Luca Trazzi. How do you consider this machine?
AM: It’s a nice machine, one that – opposite to Totem- is thought for a home use and is imbued with all the things that mean “design” today. Our Totem, per absurdum, is its opposite. Banally, but willingly so, is less designed. But it is also more original. Allow me to say that it does not chase fads: it is not about transparent surfaces, nor I drew something full of rounded shapes or – instead- with edgy corners everywhere. The Totemina lives one life of its own within the boundaries of the so-called industrial design. It will be new even 10 years from now, it will always be contemporary and will not be seen as a machine from the past.
Industrial design tends to immediately please and tease the viewer with beautiful shapes that are destined to become old. After two or three years the common taste will then look for something else, something “newer”. These considerations, which supported my project, allow me to say that the Totem machine is ageless and it will not become visually boring. Because this is what I am aiming to: less-designed objects. Upon a less-designed object time and fashion cannot impose their wear and tear. The little tree is, no matter how absurd or obvious this may sound, something that nobody has ever designed even if it’s been around since ever!

CC: Be professional or household types, most coffee machines look like shoe-boxes or public telephone booths. How do you confront these two definitions?
AM: When designing a coffee-machine several cost and technological considerations limit the range of possibilities. Changing a shape might dramatically increase costs: at times a simple curve becomes impossible to manufacture because of the internal components, which have fixed dimensions and cannot be squeezed to accommodate the design. Take our Totemina: it would have been totally different had we altered the “nose” dimensions - what we came to call the “nose”, i.e. where the capsules are inserted, and drinks are brewed. I might have drawn that “nose” smaller, but Tuttoespresso couldn’t physically reduce its dimensions. So we needed to re-consider it, in one way or another – and I integrated the operating lever in that nose.

CC: So it is possible to design a coffee-machine that does not look like a shoe-box or a public telephone-booth?
AM: Well, you can do so when your industrial counter-part is patient and an enthusiast, too: he has to invest more time in the project phase and also in the development stage. Often he may be required to modify standardised mechanical parts and this may add some costs to the project. That’s why manufacturers often opt for classic shapes, which turn out to be less expensive or at least less mind-consuming, albeit less innovative.

CC: Let alone your Totem, someone tries to be innovative. For instance Cimbali has asked Giorgetto Giugiaro’s Italdesign to inspire the shapes of their Emblema machine, while their M39 has been shown at the last edition of the Host exhibition in Milan sporting a superficial finish mutuated from the car industry: per se a new idea for the coffee machine industry.
AM: Often it suffices to change materials or their transparency to change the whole look of one object. To pick again your example, certainly we can immediately spot a difference between a black shoe-box and a semi-translucent one. To change an object’s look you need not to change a lot, and an innovative material – never used in a certain industry- may be enough. Or you can approach the project in a truly innovative manner.

CC: Totem, the tree of awakenings: a protuding part supposed to merely have an esthetic impact has ended up conditioning the whole machine, even its name.
AM: It’s like that. Since the start my idea was to create an object not immediately recognisable, in terms of its function. If you look at the Totem object, you may wonder what is it. Also: let’s say somebody approaches the Totem machine, coffee-capsule in his hands; he’s willing to make her/him-self a coffee – yet she/he starts staring at the machine, at the tree… and at the cups: which are not sitting in the usual tray but they are floating, hanging from the branches as if they were flowers, or leaves. In that moment that person is living in a small dream-scape.
More down to earth, a machine that makes you dream a little may even brew a better coffee. After all, coffee is a pleasure: what if the machine is not just a well-dressed technical object, what if it is able to convey nice sensations to its users? Well, there and then a moment of true poetry can become reality. And coffee will probably taste better.
Let’s try thinking at this concept in a different perspective. For instance, try to dismantle over a table most coffee machines: you won’t be able to tell one from another. They are all the same: Saeco, Jura, etc. Our Totem is the only one that sticks out: it just needs its little tree to be one of a kind. I always think about this when I design.
You can say the same about cars: let’s dismantle them all and let us ask ourselves “what car is this one? And this one?” There is the radiator, indeed: always different and ever important, it allows to distinguish a BMW from a Mercedes or a Fiat. Little details cannot be mistaken. And our small Totem has the tree as a point of reference.

CC: You reference to the car industry and its so-called “family feel” prompts me to ask you: is Totem going to remain alone or do you plan an extended family of products?
AM: Well, Luca Majer has in mind to make a smaller one. The Totem gears around a built-in water tank of 3,7 liters, far too much water for a household machine. Yes, I believe a smaller Totem will come, downsized.

CC: Different or the same look?
AM: It should be the same, as it should make itself known as a member of the “Totem by Tuttoespresso” family, even if on a smaller scale. Clearly it will be resized with some changes – for instance the “nose” where the capsules are inserted. It shall be re-proportioned in a manner that anyone looking a both machines will recognise them as a unique object of design, albeit with different dimensions. Perhaps it will be a surprise.


WHO IS ANGELO MICHELI?

From endurance to design
Important projects and coffee machines

Angelo Micheli was born in 1959 at Crotta d’Adda (Cremona), on the flatlands between Milano and Parma. At sixteen years old he partook in the Italian championship of endurance, while improving his wood sculpting skills. Then he became an architect, since 1986 joining as partner of Michele De Lucchi the Michele De Lucchi Studio (Milan, Italy).

His design has enlightened several unique projects, both at Italian (coordination of the Olivetti design department; re-design of Poste Italiane’s interiors; corporate image of banca Intesa, Italy’s largest bank) and international levels (objects by Pelikan; interior design system for Deutsche Bank’; HQ interiors at Novartis, Basel; franchise stores for Mandarina Duck, office system for Unifor, etc.)

He has been contracted by Luca Majer since 1987, developing together innovative vending and table-top coffee-machines and accessories for Rhea Vendors (Moda, Luce II) and Tuttoespresso (Totem, NEWS cups).