Richard Sapper: Fifty Years at the Drawing Board

To get to Richard Sapper's studio in central Milan, you have to take a creaking, 100-year-old elevator to the fourth floor of the apartment building where he and his wife have lived for decades. The elevator has the original dark wood paneling, and the ancient gears and pulleys hoist it upward at a glacial pace. So the feeling on approaching Sapper's lair is that you're traveling back in time. But Sapper, a pioneer of industrial design who got his start at Daimler-Benz in the mid-1950s, is not stuck in the past. Even at 75, he is still experimenting.

A German who adopted the world's fashion capital as his home, Sapper designs singular products that people keep for years and companies sell for decades—for example, the ThinkPad laptop for IBM (IBM) (Lenovo now owns the ThinkPad brand) or the Tizio Lamp for Italy's Artemide. A Sapper design often combines advanced technology, simplicity of form, and surprise. "The most important thing for me is to give everything I do a form that expresses something," he says. "It's not neutral. It has a point of view and a personality."