Mario Maioli is an architect, urban planner, designer and painter. For him, designing means engaging, at different times, with the scale of architecture and the landscape, with industrial products and the car, with ornamentation and, finally, with the pictorial surface.
This volume offers a reflection on the relationship between project and possibility: a process in which designing means keeping the conditions open so that other forms may emerge. In Maioli’s work, the project does not amount to a method intended to produce a specific form, but rather a mechanism that constructs conditions, relationships and possibilities. The works are provisional outcomes, moments in a process that continues to redefine its own tools. The project does not simply precede the form but continues to inhabit it: every image retains the memory of the process that generated it and, at the same time, opens up new possibilities for transformation.
Over more than forty years of research, it is possible to identify five ways in which Maioli constructs form, which change, disappear and sometimes re-emerge in different languages: Constraint, Structure, Horizon, Trace, Return.

This volume traces the evolution of Mario Maioli’s creative practice and accompanies his solo exhibition at Rifugio Digitale (22 October 2026 – 21 November 2026).

Mario Maioli, graduated from the Politecnico di Milano, beginning in the 1960s he moved fluidly across architecture, urban planning, and industrial design. From the late 1970s until 1992, his work focused on the automotive sector as Responsible of the Design Coordination at FIAT Auto, playing a pivotal role in shaping the identity of modern Italian automobiles. After concluding his industrial career, Maioli returned to his roots, reinterpreting the technological expertise he had acquired through an artistic lens. Between 1985 and 2000, he devoted himself to the creation of ornaments and jewellery, blending goldsmithing tradition with techniques derived from the automotive sector. At the same time, beginning in 1985, he developed an intense body of work in acrylic painting, creating a visual language characterised by structured compositions, vibrant colour, and dynamic energy. His production includes more than 1,300 works, exhibited in Italy and internationally.
As he himself stated, design must “respond to society’s needs and promote innovation without resorting to superficial aesthetics.”
The journey of Mario Maioli is a continuous exercise in reinvention: from architecture to the automobile, from industrial product to artistic expression, up to the conquest of the full freedom of creativity.

Isabella Patti is an Associate Professor of Design in the Department of Architecture at the University of Florence. She is a design historian and critic whose research centres on Italian design culture in the twentieth century and its contemporary transformations, examining its key figures, institutions, practices, and modes of transmission. A core aspect of her work explores the relationships among history, criticism, and design practice, alongside developing historiographical tools that interpret design beyond linear timelines, traditional periodisation, and established disciplinary boundaries. Her current research investigates the potential for constructing historical and critical interpretations of design through relationships, discontinuities, and genealogies.