Michele
De Lucchi

New covers

De Lucchi is a designer, architect and writer – amongst his many achievements he designed the Tolomeo lamp, the world’s best-selling lamp (you know the one).

Italian Harry Potter publisher Adriano Salani Editore is releasing a new series of covers for the Harry Potter stories, designed by AMDL CIRCLE and Michele De Lucchi.

On January 21, Adriano Salani Editore published a new edition of the Harry Potter books , with covers created in tandem by Portuguese illustrator Andreas Rocha, architect Michele De Lucchi (director of Domus and creator of projects such as the Tolomeo lamp for Artemide) and his studio Amdl Circle. This new edition stands out because it places at the center of the images “the space, the objects and the atmospheres that these objects give to the spaces”, as De Lucchi explained in an interview with La Stampa , showing the characters instead as small elements of the whole, almost always from behind.

Since De Lucchi is a renowned architect, it’s not a surprise that buildings form a central part of these new cover designs, with unique visions of Hogwarts, the Burrow, Hagrid’s hut and Azkaban prison.

De Lucchi was introduced to the stories after his children were gifted the books by an aunt whilst, appropriately enough, they were studying at a Gothic boarding school in England. He says he loves the series for ‘having invented an alternative society and world. A complete and complex society, in which readers recognize themselves, and evolve along with the transformation of the society itself.’

We were curious how he came up with his cover design approach. It turns out it was a team effort based around a group De Lucchi created, called AMDL CIRCLE. This is an interdisciplinary project of architects, writers, editors, graphic designer, illustrator (Andrea Rocha) and font designers (Elias Hanzer and Fabian Harb from a Swiss firm called Dinamo).

The Circle is a multidisciplinary group of young people to whom I would pass on my intellectual and philosophical position and the working methods that I have used over the years. I asked the group to interpret my work reflecting it on Harry Potter’s magical world, to understand how much of my visionary approach can be related to an imaginary reality.

As architects we inevitably approached the novel by having in mind the space, the objects and the atmosphere that these objects generate in space. For each volume we identified a symbolic architecture, looking for the same archetypes in contemporary works designed by AMDL CIRCLE.

De Lucchi and his team took wizarding world locations and represented them as ‘visionary architectures’: 

An imagination without limits, free from the constraints imposed by the design and production of a product.

For each book, an architecture was identified that the designers of Amdl Circle then developed following the style of some of De Lucchi’s famous creations. Rocha finally inserted the structure into the final design.

The architecture and buildings represented on the new covers drew on the design imagery of the team and the studio, and particularly buildings that have symbolic connections with the places from the Harry Potter stories. They drew inspiration from the research Earth Stations and Stations on Planet Heart; architectural visions, in De Lucchi’s words, ‘designed to respect the environment and to create common access multi-engagement spaces where people can experience unprogrammed moments of learning, joy, interaction and reflection.’

Inspired by De Lucchi, the team’s aim was :

To broaden the vision of the novel, to give everyone a space to fill and develop on their own.

The seven new covers were also enhanced with a new typeface by Swiss designers Elias Hanzer and Fabian Harb (Dinamo).

This spurred them to centre their vision on the settings – not necessarily the characters – in the books: 

Therefore, at the centre of this new fantastic world we won’t find the protagonists but instead imaginative architectures around which everyone can experience different emotions.

The choice was precisely to broaden the vision of the story, to give everyone a space to fill, to develop. So not the protagonists at the center, but imaginative architectures, around which everyone can give their own interpretation, can be moved in a different way. It is a broader, more stimulating, perhaps even deeper view of the entire plot.  Many of the images chosen for the covers are taken from the experiments that we call “Earth Stations”, stations on planet Earth that we assume we will have to design to create a new type of building capable of fostering human relationships in the near future.

In the design of the Harry Potter covers with my studio AMDL CIRCLE, we have included iconic elements of our architectural research to amplify the reader’s imagination and the iconography of the saga through scenarios never seen before, placing the fantasy genre in dialogue with contemporary architecture.

Mariagrazia Mazzitelli, editorial director of Salani: There is something ‘Potterian’ in the character, in the studio he directs, just look at his website. Our proposal was greeted with immediate enthusiasm and, right from the first meeting, the architect had a clear idea of how to create the covers. We worked with absolute harmony, putting together two teams - Salani and the AMDL CIRCLE studio - as if we were creating a building, using natural elements such as wood, landscape, color and light to amplify the reader’s imagination and the imagery of Harry Potter. Because the saga itself is nothing but an exemplary architecture of words where everything holds together.

By creating these architectural settings, AMDL CIRCLE hoped to bridge the gap between Harry’s imagination and the imagination of his readers – even if long-term fans have strong ideas of what these places look like in their minds: 

We created a new visual reference to welcome new and old generations of fans by giving the covers an innovative and undeniable look.

As architects, we inevitably approached the novel by having in mind the space, the objects and the atmosphere that these objects generate in space.

We took wizarding world locations and represented them as visionary architectures: an imagination without limits, free from the constraints imposed by the design and production of a product.

To give these magical structures a basis in reality, many were modelled on existing AMDL CIRCLE projects – both real and conceptual.

The final covers, created in collaboration with illustrator Andreas Rocha, were presented in an exhibition at the AMDL CIRCLE studio, accompanied by an architectural sketch and one of De Lucchi’s hallmark wooden models for each of the buildings.