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Nanda Vigo: light is everything 

October 22, 2026

Nanda Vigo (1936-2020), Milanese by birth, earned a degree in architecture in Lausanne and, following a brief period in the USA working for Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Fallingwater she admired, though not his attitude towards young people, returned to Milan in 1959 to open her own firm. That same year, Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani had opened the Azimut gallery, which had rapidly become a point of reference for the avant-garde. 

She spent most of her time with the artists that would meet at Bar Jamaica, next to the Brera Academy, where “everyone” would go: photographers, architects and designers, as well as writers, intellectuals, actors and the new faces of television. It was at Bar Jamaica, in 1960, that she crossed paths with Piero Manzoni and - as she recounted in her later years in a 2018 interview - “We looked into each other’s eyes and we were together”. It was to be a rather sad and troubled story: Manzoni was a radical and innovative artist who struggled with the fact that Vigo was also an artist. They argued, but she was not to be dissuaded. Their story came to an end in February 1963, when Piero died of a heart attack before he had even turned thirty. 

Nanda Vigo, Ambiente cronotopico vivibile displayed at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan, an illuminated cube with reflective floor and ceiling. (Domus 451, 1967) 

However, it was through her encounter with Lucio Fontana, the artist who changed painting in the post-war period in Italy and beyond, that she really found her direction. She had been an admirer of his since the 1946 Manifiesto Blanco, a statement of intent that focused on the new elements of artistic research, time and space, which was followed in 1949 by Spatialism, the movement that saw Fontana take art beyond the confines of the canvas. She visited him at his studio and became his assistant for a while, working for him mainly on installations, thanks to her training as an architect. 

Nanda Vigo worked intensely and travelled extensively in that period, which led her to discover the ZERO Group, founded in Germany in 1957 by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, a European movement that worked with light, movement and industrial materials, and she became a member. She said that at the time everyone - meaning her artistic peers - was poor yet always on the move. Her membership of ZERO resulted architecturally in the ZERO House in Milan, an apartment conceived as an experimental space with light, mirrors and industrial materials and completed in 1962, as well as in works of art that she exhibited in group exhibitions throughout Europe. In 1965, she organised an exhibition in Fontana’s studio with around thirty artists from the ZERO Group, which brought Milan into contact with the European avant-garde. 

Portrait of Nanda Vigo by Ugo Mulas. In the article, Ettore Sottsass spoke about the ZERO House, writing that while he generally hated white, in this case he found it special, rarefied and almost absolute. (Domus 432, 1965) 

ZERO House, view of the conversation area with white leather sofas and a white-carpeted floor and, on the wall, a Lucio Fontana cut on sheet metal. (Domus 416, 1964) 

In her work, artificial light played a central role, often enhanced with intense colours such as blue, violet, pink and yellow and accompanied by industrial materials such as steel, mirrors, patterned glass and Perspex, chosen because they reflected light, allowing her to lend form to space. The first outcome of this experimentation was the work on chronotopes, pieces in glass and light that explore the relationship between space and time and whose poetics were encapsulated in Il Manifesto cronotopico of 1964.  

In 1964, Gio Ponti published the plans for the “Uno scarabeo sotto una foglia” house in issue 414 of Domus, writing that the project could be used freely. The same year, the contemporary art collector and surveyor Giobatta Meneguzzo decided to have the house built in Malo, in the province of Vicenza. Collaborating with Gio Ponti, Nanda Vigo designed the interiors that were to house the collection. Here she experimented with white tiles to cover the walls, something she repeated in the house-museum of the painter Remo Brindisi in Lido di Spina (Ferrara) between 1971 and 1973. 

The “Uno scarabeo sotto una foglia” house in Malo (Vicenza). The basement, which is home to most of the collection, is accessed via a staircase covered in grey shag carpet. A work by Enrico Castellani is in the foreground, to the right. The lighting is wall-mounted and continuous. (Domus 482, 1970) 

She worked as a designer above all for lighting companies such as Arredoluce, as well as creating tailor-made furnishings for homes and showrooms and collaborating with Driade and Glass Italia, among others. 

She exhibited in more than 400 exhibitions worldwide, including at the 1982 International Art Exhibition in Venice. She received the 1971 New York Industrial Design Award for the Golden Gate lamp, the first prize at the 1976 Saint-Gobain design award, the Koiné first prize for the design of the Piero Manzoni exhibition at Palazzo Reale in 1998 and the Compasso d’Oro for the Light/Light shelves in 2001, among others. 

She stated that, all things considered, she had always preferred art over architecture and design, because art imposes fewer limits and freedom of expression had always been essential for her. 

Curated by Domus - © Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

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