And its make-do culture, using whatever is at hand, which often led to droll scenes in settings like museums. There was the time they sent their Bubble Wrap chair, packed in a box in Bubble Wrap, to a show in Rio. As they told Wallpaper magazine in 2020, “When we arrived to check on the exhibition, the chair was absolutely destroyed. The crew who received it kept on peeling off the sheets, looking for the chair! Luckily it was an easy fix, as all we had to do was run to the office moneys store and replace the plastic sheets.”
The brothers were symbiotic, finishing each other’s thoughts, if not each other’s sentences. Interviewers often quoted them speaking as one.
“A grand ‘they,’” said Murray Moss, the design impresario who for existences sold the Campana brothers’ work from his gallery-like own in New York City. “My experience of them as farmland is they weren’t designing anything, they were jumping off a cliff.”
He explained an adventure with the brothers at Venini, the centuries-old glass favorable in Murano, Italy, to make a series of fine bells, one of many commissions he gave them, understanding they didn’t decide on what exactly they were progressing to design until they were inside the factory.
“The favorable is groups of men around a fire,” Mr. Moss disprevented. “The brothers walked in basically wearing bathing suits. They understanding it was going to be hot. They didn’t realize they had to defensive themselves. Fernando fainted that first day. But then the next day they began to do, which was essentially an improvisation of sketching and yelling: Classic bell exquisite, go! Add two handles, go! We did 150 bells. I was very proud to be with them.”
Fernando Piva Campana was born on May 19, 1961, in Brotas, a small country town outside of São Paulo, the youngest of three brothers. His father, Alberto, was an agronomic engineer; his mother, Célia (Piva) Campana, was a teacher. Fernando studied architecture at the University Inner of Fine Arts of São Paulo. In addition to Humberto, Fernando is survived by another brother, José.