Peter Shire's Grand Tour APARTMENT Magazine

"Some of these photos I took with the intuition that they were important, and all of them with the desire to capture my impressions and memories. Who knew they would become something? The accidental tourist, the accidental documentarian?"

—Peter Shire

Peter Shire’s Grand Tour: A Snapshot of Design History, 1980–1989, edited by Christoph Radl, is a deeply personal photographic diary chronicling the Memphis decade, “the last design revolution,” spearheaded by maestro Ettore Sottsass, the leaning tower of Italian design. Peter didn’t know it at the time, but his snapshots of 1980s Italy (with a quick escape to Vienna) were the fortuitous beginning, development, and end of something big. Peter Shire’s Grand Tour combines candid photos with personal interludes to chart the heady, unpolished brilliance of a movement before it knew what it was. With the unselfconscious eye of a tourist turned historian, Peter's camera captured everything from Caravaggio at the Uffizi to lingerie shop windows and beautiful sunsets, along with rebel selfies and a cast of Memphis Group legends, including Ettore Sottsass, Alessandro Mendini and Matteo Thun.

Christoph Radl, art director and graphic designer, moved to Milan in the 1970s and in 1980 had the golden opportunity to work at the Sottsass Associati studio. From there, he became the graphic designer for Memphis and has been Peter's friend ever since. "I was there too and had no idea what was going on... It took me many years to begin to understand what I had witnessed. But I didn't take any photos. Fortunately, Peter did."

This book expands Apartment's long exploration of Memphis, radical Italian design, and its peripheries. It follows earlier articles on Nathalie Du Pasquier, Alessandro Mendini, Andrea Branzi, Santi Caleca, Peter Shire himself, as well as conversations with Gianni Pettena, Ugo La Pietra, and Lapo Binazzi, among others. Peter Shire's Grand Tour offers an unfiltered snapshot of design history, seen through the eyes of a young artist who was simply living it—an outsider, in a sense, from within. Looking from the outside in, or from the inside out?

Published by Apartamento Publishing SL
First edition: April 15, 2025.
Dimensions: 224 x 152 mm.
Pages: 420.
Binding: hardcover

ISBN: 978-84-09-70486-6