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To keep and store ref­er­ence mate­r­i­al such as meet­ing notes, project doc­u­ments, sketch­es, cor­re­spon­dence, print­outs and oth­er things so that they are easy to find when you need them, is a key fac­tor in a good struc­ture at work.

If we fur­ther­more want the stor­age method to be aes­thet­i­cal­ly pleas­ing even as the mate­r­i­al is read­i­ly avail­able, it is a real chal­lenge (but an enjoy­able such).

A man that real­ly suc­ceed­ed in this is the late Ital­ian design­er Achille Cas­tiglioni (1918−2002). He is the cre­ator of, among oth­er things, this chair and this lamp.

In his stu­dio in Milan, he stored the mate­r­i­al for all his projects in project fold­ers on the shelves of an entire wall, floor to ceil­ing. Each project had its own fold­er and on the spine of the fold­er, the project num­ber was print­ed. All his­tor­i­cal project mate­ri­als were always avail­able, eas­i­ly acces­si­ble and eas­i­ly found in an, in my opin­ion, ele­gant way in har­mo­ny with the rest of the office.

Here is a pic­ture from Wallpaper’s March 2006 edition.

Cas­tiglio­n­is stu­dio is pre­served as ​“Stu­dio Muse­um Achille Cas­tiglioni” in Milan. Open Tues­days to Sat­ur­days. Pre-book­ing of vis­its are recommended.

If you would be influ­enced by Cas­tiglio­n­is way to store his ref­er­ence mate­r­i­al, how would you store yours? 

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