Architect Rodolfo Agrella found himself designing products because of a lack of international resources in Venezuela, where he was born and raised. “I had to create specific products to include them in the spaces I was designing,” he says. After studying architecture at the Central University of Venezuela and the Polytechnic University of Milan, he cut his teeth between firms in his hometown of Caracas and Cino Zucchi Architetti in Milan before creating his first piece of furniture, a table he describes as “pretty ugly.”
But inspiration kept coming, and he was pushed further into product design when he was selected to assist in a workshop for famed Brazilian furniture designers and brothers Humberto and Fernando Campana. “Everything I am, from a visual and phenomenological perspective, I owe to my roots,” Agrella says. “The way I understand things and that mental place where I go to find inspiration is represented by my country and its people.”
The Ara lighting collection is produced with multiple layers of fireproof, water-resistant paper that can grow or contract
Today, he crafts everything from dinnerware to large-scale objects, such as cabinets and lighting. Among his latest is the Ara collection, a lighting system produced in multiple layers of fireproof, water-resistant paper that can grow or contract depending on a space’s needs. To create it, 150 sheets of paper ranging from 200 to 5,000 feet long were assembled on flat pads that were cut into a specific shape to give the design its curvy silhouette.
For Agrella, the shift from architecture to product design was about getting rid of “the preset boundaries of the architectural discipline and using those design tools and strategies to create new things in 2D and 3D,” he says. Agrella says his biggest accomplishment is “translating the spirit of Venezuela into an international language.” While his industry heroes are Italian designers Bruno Munari and Gio Ponti, “I like to think my aesthetic blends the sassiness from the tropics with a refined European flair.”
A monochrome exercise surface design by Rodolfo
This article originally appeared in HD’s February 2020 issue.
