Grazie Giorgio!

We often get asked how did we thought of starting to think about cakes and their connection to design, and why did we get ourselves in this to the point our initial idea now reaches a dimension we could never even start to ponder, and to get the attention we never thought to have.

Well, the initial culprit of all this is the Venetian designer Giorgio Camuffo, whom we met during the time we lived in Italy and worked in Fabrica, Benetton’s communication research centre. Giorgio used to head Fabrica’s workshop programme, and besides his work as a professor at IUAV he runs his own design studio. And it is from his studio that he publishes Sugo Magazine, that gather contributions from his friends form all over the world, and that he publishes whenever he wants to. And it was for Sugo that Giorgio asked Frederico, in the end of 2005, to send news from Lisbon, as Sugo was going to have a new section dedicated to news from various cities.

We were at the time working together on other things, and during an evening work session Frederico brought the Sugo news issue to the table. What to write, on design and architecture, form Lisbon? And it is then that Rita poses the question: “What if you write about cakes?”. A good question, and a good conversation topic for the rest of the evening — we left all what we were doing and spent the rest of the night talking about cakes, on how they are such an important part of our lives (and especially Rita’s!) and on the way people who visit Portugal are always so surprised and impressed with the choice and variety of cakes everywhere. And then we also started talking about how these cakes are made according to many of the elements that characterise our work as designers.

From there we elected one cake, the Pirâmide, which we elected as the cake of cakes. The true urban myth of its origin, the fact that it is not a pyramid, but a cone, the cherry on top. It has all to be the ambassadress of our project wherever we go,next to Pastel de Nata, which everyone knows (and about which we talked for icon, later on). In the top photo you can see, inside Pedro and Rita’s fridge, the two pirâmides we bought in different places, and which we photographed, both outside and, after a precise vertical section, inside: that’s on the bottom photo. Sugo came out in early 2006, and we haven’t stopped since… Thanks Giorgio, without you we would have never gotten ourselves into this world!