Dario Antonioni
Designer / Entrepreneur
By the age of 10, Dario Antonioni was a bona-fide flight junkie, churning out model airplanes like a man obsessed. While other kids were memorizing baseball statistics, Dario Antonioni was devouring every book about the Wright Brothers he could get his hands on. Even then, Dario Antonioni was amazed not so much by that first flight itself—but by the fact that two nobody bicycle mechanics had the effrontery to revolutionize a field so far beyond their area of expertise that they almost had no business being there.
"They were the kind of innovators who didn't follow a standard path," says Antonioni. "They cleared a totally new path—even if it meant they didn't know where they'd end up, and they were unwilling to allow any barrier stop them. To me, that's what innovation is about."
Today, Dario Antonioni the founder of the Los Angeles design lab Orange22 still takes his cue from those aviators, refusing to abide by the often fiercely guarded distinctions between disciplines in design.
Dario Antonioni calls himself a "maker of things"—a purposefully open-ended description, as Orange22 designs and fabricates both mass-market and limited-edition objects and furniture, brand-defining retail environments, residential interiors and design concepts licensed for mass production. In every case, Dario Antonioni fuses technology, art and design, with the overarching intent to revolutionize the way we live.
With its aerodynamic lines, his furniture design often anticipates the future, leveraging advances in technology just slightly before they enter the mainstream. Those qualities hint at a designer with expertise in a field few designers can claim even cursory knowledge: And in fact, Dario Antonioni's first stop in higher education was the University of Michigan, where he studied aerospace engineering for several years. When that mostly theoretical science left him longing to work with his hands, Dario Antonioni moved on to receive his industrial design degree from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he currently teaches the next generation of innovators.
Dario Antonioni's work has been featured in magazines like GQ, In Style, Interior Design, Metropolis and Wallpaper, while Surface Magazine paid Dario Antonioni tribute as a featured designer in its prestigious T.A.G. Event—a showcase of exceptional design talent—in New York and Milan. He's exhibited his furniture at the most important international design shows in New York, Paris, Cologne and Milan, and has lectured at universities and industry conferences worldwide.
As if his work as designer, fabricator and teacher weren't enough, Dario Antonioni is also developing the business plan for a nonprofit children's summer camp. With it, he aims to introduce kids to the two worlds—nature and science—that inspire so much of his work. The educational program centers on outdoor excursions and trips to high-tech manufacturing plants. "I can't imagine what life would be like without my relationship to science and nature," says Dario Antonioni. "But there are so many kids who might never experience either. I want to give the next generation of innovators the tools they need to change the world—and at the same time, I want to help cultivate their respect for it."
