Peter Shire’s Grand Tour

‘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 my memory. Who would have known that 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 photo diary chronicling the decade of Memphis—‘the last design revolution’, headed by maestro Ettore Sottsass, the leaning tower of Italian design. Peter didn’t know it at the time, but his snapshots of Italy in the ‘80s (with a sidequest to Vienna) were the serendipitous beginning, middle, and end of something big. Peter Shire’s Grand Tour pairs candid pictures with personal interludes to trace the heady, unpolished brilliance of a movement before it knew what it was. With the unwitting eye of a tourist-turned-historian, Peter’s camera captured it all—from Caravaggio at the Uffizi to storefronts of women’s lingerie shops and beautiful sunsets, alongside rogue 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 ‘70s, getting his golden chance to work at the studio Sottsass Associati in 1980. From there, he went on to become the graphic designer of Memphis and has been friends with Peter ever since. ‘I was there too, and I had no idea what was going on … It took me many years before I finally started to understand what I’d been a witness to. But I didn’t take pictures. Fortunately, Peter did’.

This book expands on Apartamento’s long-standing exploration of Memphis, Italian Radical Design, and their peripheries. It follows early features 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, and more. Peter Shire’s Grand Tour offers an unfiltered snapshot into design history, seen through the eyes of a young artist who was simply living it—an outsider, in a way, on the inside. Looking outside-in or inside-out?