When asked to name the designers who have most influenced his work, industrial designer Dario Antonioni rattles off a list of figures whose innovations fit more appropriately in airport hangars than on display at the Cooper-Hewitt. They’re people like Howard Hughes, the Wright brothers, and Burt Rutan, the aerospace engineer who decided NASA was moving too slowly toward commercial space tourism so he created his own shuttle, the SpaceshipOne.

Antonioni, who founded his Los Angeles design lab, Orange22, in 2000, has been infatuated with flight since childhood, which he spent building model airplanes and devouring books about the two bicycle mechanics who took flight in Kitty Hawk, N.C. The smooth, curvaceous lines of aircraft carriers themselves do inform many of Antonioni’s better-known designs, from his Luna Chair, with its powder-coated, “lunar landing” legs, to the futuristic Sputnik Desk, billed as “more a space station than a work station.” But what most thrills Antonioni about flight is that its pioneers had the effrontery to innovate beyond the limitations of available technology, creating new possibilities in the process. It floors him to think that Hughes, for example, enabled commercial flight by convincing people— thinking people—to crawl into massive, steel vessels that would catapult them, inconceivably, through the skies.

The word “limitless” is one of Antonioni’s favorites, and his repertoire of work bears that out. His furniture, showcased at major furniture fairs across the world, dissolves the barriers between design and technology, while his retail environments—including spaces for DKNY, Ralph Lauren, travel boutique Flight 001, Ducati, and Fred Segal’s Conveyor, among others—establish complete worlds unto themselves. Antonioni’s newest venture is a line of travel products, launching in the fall of 2005, that he says will redefine the shapes of familiar objects, from cosmetics bags to money belts.

ABOVE: The SPUTNIK desk, a capacious workstation with aerodynamic curves, “very simply expresses my love for exploration, the future, and flight," says Antonioni. PHOTO: ORANGE22