Jasper Morrison
I remember at one point in the development of the Bottle rack, my first project for Magis, I had designed it with feet on the bottom edge which would interlock with corresponding slots in the upper edge to allow it to stack and stay aligned vertically. Once we had the first moulded samples, Fabio Moneta, the engineer at Magis at that time, had some doubts about the stability of the racks when fully loaded and stacked up to five units high. He suggested we should move the feet to the top edge to provide a more stable base. I was quite upset because I didn’t much like the idea of the feet sticking out at the top, but we agreed to test it, and Fabio loaded a stack of five of them full of 1.5-litre water bottles, so there were 30 bottles stacked up above the four little feet, and it held them pretty well. I was about to congratulate myself, and Perazza seemed to think it was fine too, when Fabio said, “let’s have a look in the morning and see how it’s doing then,” and we went off to dinner. When I got there the next morning they were waiting for me, and of course the whole pile had collapsed, throwing bottles out in every direction. I don’t think anyone ever used the rack to store so many bottles, but it was a powerful demonstration, and the mould had to be adjusted.