Chief Advisor
Chief Advisor
Founder: Cibicworkshop
Founding Member: Memphis
Honorary Professor Tongji University
Aldo Cibic was born in Schio, Vicenza, Italy in 1955, and quickly developed a self-directed interest in the world of design. In 1981, as a partner in Sottsass Associati, he was a founding member of Memphis, an artists’ collective that was to mark an epoch-making transition in the universe of design and architecture. By vocation and inclination an innovator, one who has never favoured generic labels nor stylistic excesses, Cibic adopted "experimentation as praxis”. In the late 1980s he founded the Studio Cibic and launched “Standard” (1991), his first self- produced collection. At the same time, he became a teacher at the Domus Academy and set up research activities with various schools, while developing his ideas around the "design of services". His projects, such as "The Solid Side" (1995) and "New Stories New Design" (2002), fostered a dynamic relationship between people and space and offered a new mode of designing places based on social interactions. He continued in this vein in subsequent years with "Microrealities" (2004) and "Rethinking Happiness" (2010). Both were presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and both originated contemporary narratives aimed at multiplying opportunities for meetings, exchanges and sharing in community life. In 2015 he curated the Venice Architecture Biennale of the Arts & Craft exhibition at the Venice pavilion.
In 1989 he founded the Cibic Workshop, not only a design studio, but a multidisciplinary research centre. Cibic Workshop strongly focuses on alternative sustainable project types aimed at enhancing local areas and defining new cultural, emotional and environmental awareness of public space. Aldo Cibic teaches at Politecnico Milano, the IUAV, Venice, and the Domus Academy; he is professor of practice at the Tongji University College of Design & Innovation in Shanghai.
In 2019 he has been selected as High-End Foreign Expert by the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs of China.
His design pieces and drawings are exhibited in the permanent collections of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Groninger Museum, the CCA (Canadian Center for Architecture) in Montreal, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Triennale Museum of Italian Design in Milan and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Aldo Cibic has been included by the architecture magazine Domus in the guide to the world's best architects “100+ best architecture firms 2019”. Inter alia, Domus editors Alessandro Mendini and Joseph Grima put forward a selection in favour of giving a voice to practices that show how “it may be possible for social architecture to really bloom in the future”.