18° COMPASSO D'ORO AWARD

Founded in 1954, the Premio Compasso d’Oro ADI award is the oldest but above all the most prominent international design award.

Conceived by Gio Ponti, for years it was organized by the La Rinascente department store, to highlight the value and quality of the products of Italian design, which was then in its early years.

It was later donated to the ADI, the Association of Industrial Design, which has been responsible for its organization since 1964, ensuring impartiality and integrity.

The products that have won the award over the fifty-year history of the Compasso d’Oro, also include the Flip-Up Cooktop designed by Domenico Moretto, which has become part of the Historic Collection of the Premio Compasso d’Oro ADI, along with an Honorable Mention for the Electronic Exhaust System. The motivation reads as follows:
“With updated materials and technologies it represents the classical principle that it is the responsibility of design to make life easier for the people who use these objects: the easy-to-clean (it may be put in the dishwasher) complex of grilles-burners and the way the entire appliance flips up from the countertop, create new qualities in terms of economy of space, domestic hygiene, and user comfort, without abandoning a typically traditional configuration”.

The Compasso d’Oro award is attributed on the basis of a pre-selection made by the Permanent Observatory on Design of the ADI, a commission of experts, designers, critics, historians, journalists specialized in the field, who are members of ADI or independent, all involved in constantly gathering information, year after year, and in assessing and selecting the best products which are then published in the annual ADI Design Index.

In an unprecedented initiative for the international design field, the Ministry of the Cultural Heritage – Regional Superintendent for the Lombardy Region, in the Decree dated 22 April 2004, declared the Historic Collection of the Premio Compasso d’Oro ADI to be of “exceptional artistic and historical interest”, consequently naming it part of the national heritage.

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