We do not know much about Pythagoras, for one thing because the information that comes to us by ancient tradition is often quite contradictory: philosopher, indeed inventor of the termine “philosophy”, mathematician and scientist, politician and legislator, miracle worker and leader of an esoteric sect. What interests us, in connection with Lia Bosch’s project, is what Plato says in Philebus with regard to a “new Prometheus” (which might be Pythagoras), when he refers to his revelation “according to which everything derives from combination of unity and multiplicity, of the finite and the infinite”, a doctrine similar to that of the Pythagoreans, as explained by Aristotle.
The “Neuma” bookcase designed by Lia Bosch for Riva 1920, made of solid walnut or oak, rrefers to this particular explanation of the origin of the world, a world where numerical relations constitute the structure of reality and thus also of ordinary things. ”Neuma” is the result in design terms of a series of relations, where every structural element is based on the number 3, from height to depth, from the width to the thicknesses, without the abstract logical model compromising the expressive and aesthetic level, the final result.
This is the miracle of design when it becomes a limited series production; the final form and the material used, wood in our case, are capable of expressing coherently and successfully, the designer’s idea, trusting us to use the object intelligently. At this point “Neuma” immediately becomes the bookcase we have spent years looking for, holding our books and also ordering them according to an ancient theory that, whatever our own philosophical outlook, can be used to classify the world, not only numbers themselves. In this case the numbers are the books and each book in turn represents another series of numbers, because knowledge is always suspended between “unity and multiplicity”; and thus the circle closes as Pythagoras would have it, just where we started.
L. 120 cm
P. 31,5 cm
H. 182 cm
Designer: Lia Bosch
Italy
