In a new Wallpaper* summer series, architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Make way for the pedalò, where 'form follows fun'
Carlo Ratti on the pedalò
You hire them by the hour. There are never any discounts, and they look back at you with the swagger of someone who knows you'll struggle to stop once you've had a taste. It is, after all, the most democratic entity on the Italian coast: the pedalò.
It is July, and it shows. The beach hums in the afternoon heat. Children pack sandcastles with hands sticky from ice lollies. Along the shoreline, the fleet of pedalò waits patiently for its next crew.
Despite its humble status today, its lineage is illustrious. Leonardo da Vinci sketched in his notebooks a craft driven by pedal-powered paddles. He, in turn, it seems, had taken his cue from the Badalone, Filippo Brunelleschi’s vessel designed to carry heavy blocks of marble up the Arno for the dome of Florence’s cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore.
It was such an inventive project that it earned, in 1421, an ‘exclusive privilege’, considered by many the first industrial patent in history. Its fate, however, was less glorious: the Badalone sank on one of its early voyages.
One had to wait, then, until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the modern pedalò to appear. Those were the years when the spread of the bicycle made pedals seem to turn up everywhere: on land and even at sea.
The word pedalò comes from the French pédaler: once again, the French beat the Italians to the marketing. The primacy of invention, though, may still lie in the Peninsula. In 1913, at Gargnano on Lake Garda, the blacksmith Angelo Terzi built the Terziscafo: a five-metre-long larch craft, driven by the pedals of a bicycle. The outbreak of the First World War, however, cut its development short: Terzi was called up by the Alpini battalion, the prototype was left first abandoned and finally sold to a fisherman.
Since then, the engine has stayed practically identical. What has changed, instead, is everything around it: an entire floating menagerie of pedalòs with a slide, a sunshade, cup holders or a sundeck; then swans, unicorns, flamingos, dragons, giant ducks. A catalogue of improbable creatures that, in the summer haze, slide into afternoon hallucinations.
It is exactly the opposite of what Pier Luigi Nervi had imagined. For the great Italian civil engineer, technique would gradually lead design towards ‘true’ forms, ever more optimal. As with racing cars. Or aeroplanes, all much alike because governed by the same laws of aerodynamics.
In other words, he believed in one of the many interpretations of the famous maxim: ‘form follows function.’ The pedalò, by contrast, is its reverse: once the technical issues are resolved, imagination can go back to power.
And perhaps this is the secret of its longevity. For generations, it has accompanied Italian summers without changing function, while constantly changing form. The masks parade by - swan, unicorn, flamingo or duck - but the playful experience stays the same. One could say: ‘form follows fun.’
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.