In a new Wallpaper* summer series, architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Fourth up: the Vibram sole, and how it helped the world find its footing
Carlo Ratti's on the Vibram sole
There is a recurring image in mountaineering magazines: a boot resting on a rock, the Alps in the background. The boot is always photographed in profile, never from below. No one turns over the sole. If they did, they would find a small yellow octagon bearing the name Vibram, and discover that they were looking at perhaps the most widespread Italian design object in the world.
We are in Via della Spiga in Milan, now in the heart of Milan’s fashion district, between Prada and Gucci. In the 1930s, however, it was still a street of artisans, where a certain Vitale Bramani ran a shop for alpine equipment. Bramani was a Milanese mountaineer, no engineer or chemist. He sold ropes, ice axes, carabiners. The paradox was already there: Milanese elegance and the brutality of the mountain, contained within the same man.
In 1935, six climbers died of exposure on Punta Rasica, in Val Bregaglia. Their leather soles, soaked with water, turned to ice. Bramani had led the expedition, repeating a route he himself had opened only a few weeks earlier. After that tragedy, he set out for a remedy.
He came across a Pirelli tyre, and saw in it a sole. He later developed his own tread, also drawing on the floors of Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, one of the places he knew best. He translated it into vulcanised rubber and patented it. The name is a contraction of VI-tale BRAM-ani. The company remains family-owned, based in Albizzate, in the province of Varese, with a laboratory in Milan’s design district that we helped design.
The name Vibram contains a sophisticated idea: the control of vibration on the ground, a physical relationship with the environment mediated through the sole of the foot. The intelligence lies in the sole itself, visible to anyone who looks from below, yet unnoticed by almost everyone else.
Over the years, its range of uses has widened. With the invention of FiveFingers, that strange glove-shoe that separates the five toes and has since been copied everywhere, Vibram made the opposite move. From hyper-protection to near-nakedness. From the maximal sole to the minimal one. The five extensions of the foot transmit information from the ground in real time, returning the body to a more primitive connection with the terrain.
From tyre to bare skin, by way of vulcanised rubber: a very Italian exercise in sophisticated simplification. A primitive foot became the manifesto of the “paleo” tribe, somewhere between the hippies of the 1960s and the Flintstones.
Few people know that everyone from hipsters converted to the comfort of trekking shoes to the United States Marines is walking on a Milanese invention. Billions of people scamper about on Vibram soles without the faintest idea. It may be the most influential Italian design object in the world that no one sees, because it is always facing downwards. The question it raises is an interesting one: does design matter if no one sees it?
It matters all the same. Every step on a mountain path, every soldier’s march, every trail run is a dialogue between foot and ground. Mediated by the intuition of a Milanese shopkeeper-mountaineer who, in 1935, looked at a wheel and saw the future.
About 'Objectify' – a summer series from Italy by Carlo Ratti
Italy’s design canon has been told many times. The Bialetti moka pot, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, the Arco floor lamp: you know the list, and so does every airport bookshop and first-year design student. This column will discuss, poke, investigate, prod, ridicule and beatify the less glamorous Italian objects. They are the ones you ought to know, so that when you visit Italy, or spot apparitions of it on a friend’s social media, you can smugly point out: “Did you know the mosquito coil is a masterpiece of Italian design? The condom? The motorway toll transponder?” Objects so ordinary that Italians walk past them, or handle them every day, without registering that someone, with a mellifluous surname, designed them.
Carlo Ratti
Proust wrote a seven-volume novel because a small cake dipped in tea, the madeleine, unlocked an involuntary flood of memory. For followers of the Italian version of this column, published weekly in Il Sole 24 Ore, the nation’s favourite Sunday read, perhaps these objects will have a similar effect. For you, anglophone readers peering at this somewhere between Rummidge and Euforia, they offer something else: beach conversation topics, an eye trained on unexpected places, and perhaps a few new madeleines for when you visit the peninsula yourself. After all, objects are never just objects. As the great Milanese designer Achille Castiglioni of Arco-floor-lamp fame once declared: “Objects should keep us company.” Especially during this scorching summer.