Timeless design

‘It’s better to see a broken pitcher than an abandoned plastic bottle’.

The writer Fran Lebowitz once said: ‘I hate money but I love things’. The things she was referring to were just attractive objects, and there is something in the way she put it that perfectly captures Miguel Milá and everything that came from the way he approached his profession and his trade: an aversion towards anything that reeks of ostentation, and especially care to ensure that the objects he designed ended up attractive by stripping them of everything superfluous. In his case, they were attractive because they were useful and even obliging, friendly.

One of the most cutting-edge European industrial designers today, Jasper Morrison, speaks eloquently on this point: ‘What struck me when I discovered his work was the meticulous balance between straight lines and curves. The most intelligent designers are aware of the importance of this balance. There is no need to lean one way or the other [...] because this middle ground is where the object gains the right tension. Milá is a repository of the recipe for the naturalness of objects since he first picked up a pencil.’ That recipe is actually called intuition. According to André Ricard, Milá’s designs stand out because of ‘a je ne sais quoi between elegant and evident’. The concept that summarises the enigma that Ricard is referring to may be the naturalness that Morrison mentioned, facilitated by technological moderation that brings a sense of calmness. Functionally speaking, intuition and naturalness reveal the beauty of the useful object which, in Milá’s case, has always been sustainable.

Still working at age 92, Milá released one of his last masterpieces, a pitcher, in 2019. After more than sixty years of work and exposure to the utmost sophistication, the master worked with earthenware for the first time, and with the pairing of this material and his perennial ingenuity, he met one of our most basic and pleasurable needs: to drink water. In a fresh, natural, clean way.