Premio COMPASSO D’ORO 2011
MACRO, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma – July 12th, 2011

The ADI’s international judging panel, presided over by Architect Arturo Dell’Acqua Bellavitis, has awarded the 2011 COMPASSO D’ORO prize to DOMO–XIX Biennale dell’Artigianato Sardo “for the critical reappraisal of the role played by craftsmen in a specific cultural contest”. Pierluigi Piu, who is among the awarded designers, contributed to such project with his design of SUBER and TELARZOS. He shares the prize with all other creatives coming from different disciplines and countries who, together, have given life to an extraordinary collection of objects which re-interpret Sardinian traditions through a contemporary language.
The award ceremony was held in Rome, Italy, last July 12th, at the Museum of Contemporary Art MACRO/Testaccio, within the city’s former slaughterhouse, now reconverted – thanks to a brilliant project of renewal – into a cultural production centre. Established in 1954, the ADI Compasso d’Oro Award is the oldest and most influential international design award. Arisen by a Gio POnti’s idea, the award was conceived in order to pick out the value and quality of the Italian design products. Since 1964 its organization is care of ADI (Associazione per il Disegno Industriale) which, apart from ensuring its impartiality and integrity, every three years also assigns the awards on the basis of a pre-selection made by ADI Permanent Observatory of Design. The nearly three hundred products awarded in more than fifty years, along with the almost two thousand products selected with the Honorable Mention, are collected and kept in the Historical Collection of the Compasso d’Oro Award which, with a step that has no precedent anywhere else in the world of international design, the Italian Cultural Heritage Ministry, in April 2004, declared to be "of exceptional artistic and historical interest" and included it in Italy’s national heritage.
This acknowledgement adds now up to the Russian International Architectural Award, obtained by Pierluigi Piu in Moscow, in 2007, to the International Design Award 2009, to the Archi-Bau Award 2009 and to the nomination for Restaurant and Bar Award 2009, respectively given to him in Los Angeles, Munchen and London.