Coffee Makers

"This espresso coffee maker isn’t your traditional coffee maker! It is a small steam machine!’’. With this statement, in 1979, Richard Sapper presented Alessi's first espresso coffee maker: the 9090, the company's first object to win a Compasso d'Oro and become part of the permanent collection of MoMA in New York. The success was immediate thanks to a completely new design approach and an innovative functionality.Over the following ten years, in a completely different style, Aldo Rossi designed three unusual "table microarchitectures" that repeated the success of the 9090: La conica, La cupola and Ottagono reflect the designer's rigorous language of primary forms and play with geometries as well as with expectations by omission.These early, iconic espresso coffee makers were followed by many more, each the result of a different sense of empathy. Alessandro Mendini's Moka Alessi and David Chipperfield's Moka offer a designer interpretation of the espresso coffee maker created in the 1930s by Alfonso Bialetti, who was Alberto Alessi's maternal grandfather.Mario Trimarchi is alert to the narrative power of objects and created Ossidiana, whose shape is reminiscent of the facets of the volcanic rock of the same name. Ossidiana earned Alessi another Compasso d'Oro, the ninth for the company.Pulcina by Michele De Lucchi is a revolutionary espresso coffee maker: Thanks to a small but significant design innovation, it interrupts the dispensing of the drink at the right moment before the coffee gets a bitter aftertaste.Hieratic and sculptural, the Menhir espresso coffee maker by Michael Anastassiades, is the latest embodiment of this long tradition: a form with an emblematic presence for a new design ritual.