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Champion of Latin American design Fernando Campana passes away at 61

BOOKMARK ARTICLE

Fernando Campana cofounded Estudio Campana with his brother Humberto in 1983 and rose to fame as a leading furniture designer. He passed away in his native Brazil, aged 61, on 16 November 2022.

Since Estudio Campana’s inception, its ethos has been to uplift Brazilian design vernacular and lead in the wide use – and reuse – of ubiquitous materials. Born in 1961, Fernando worked with Humberto to bring the São Paulo-based practice to international recognition, the duo known fondly in the industry as The Campana Brothers. The furniture designer died in the Brazilian capital last week, as announced by his family on Instagram.

Raised in Brotas – a small farming town of 10,000 people – Campana and his brother found inspiration early on from the cinema, a passion that grew to encompass art and architecture when they moved to São Paulo. After completing his architecture education in 1983, Fernando joined Humberto’s studio, laying the foundation for their joint practice as collaborative industrial designers. 

‘We had been making functional sculptures, and in order for us to become furniture designers we had to find a way to bring more industrialized elements into the series,’ Campana told Bomb in a 2008 interview. This investigation eventually led to imaginative experimentations with everyday (often disregarded) resources and traditional construction methods. Tangled up in nearly 500 m of rope purchased from a São Paulo street stall, their Verhelma chair (1993) is one of the best early examples. 

Other iconic pieces, like the Favela chair (2003) and Bolotas couch (2015), would follow, as well as myriad projects spanning the creative field. The Campana Brothers’s motto was that ‘first comes the material, then the form, and finally we elaborate the function of the product by studying its ergonomics, limitations, and capabilities,’ as the two explained to London’s Design Museum. ‘The streets of São Paulo are a sort of laboratory for our designs. Whenever we need inspiration, we rely on the chaos and beauty of the city we live in.’ 

Fernando was a champion of and for Latin American design, and his memory will live on at home and abroad for many design generations to come. 

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