AROUND HOME : La Conica

YES, THERE IS something laconic about La Conica, the copper- bottomed, stainless-steel espresso coffee maker with a lid that resembles the Tin Man’s conical helmet from “The Wizard of Oz.” Introduced in 1984, Milanese architect Aldo Rossi’s design was an instant classic. As an architect, Rossi talks more than he builds. But he’s become a household name in design-conscious circles for his filter and espresso coffeepots and percolators, including La Conica’s “male” counterpart, a tea kettle named Il Conico (1986). They’re all manufactured by the Italian firm Alessi, the people who brought you kettles by Michael Graves (with the bird whistle) and Richard Sapper (with a musical whistle). What distinguishes Rossi’s creation from the others is its sense of monumentality--remarkable in such a small object--deriving from his use of simple elements: a cylinder, a cone and the little ball on top.

Those geometric forms also pay homage in a pithy (or, to use Rossi’s pun, laconic) way to the painter Giorgio de’ Chirico, whose surrealist canvases painted in the 1920s Rossi acknowledges as a major influence. Very fashionable now (they’ve even motivated advertising-agency art directors), these gloomy scenes bear evocative titles such as “The mystery and melancholy of the street,” and typically depict endless bare arcades, punctuated by a lonely tower.

That proverbial de’ Chirico tower got under Rossi’s skin. It inspired, for instance, his famous Teatro del Mondo, a small floating theater for the 1979 Venice Biennale that became a key building in the postmodern movement. In turn, Rossi’s tower stimulated similar efforts by other big-name architects such as Michael Graves (the light monitors of his San Juan Capistrano Library) and Barton Myers (the Cerritos Performing Arts Center, under construction). Now Alessi has seemingly taken those de’ Chirico-ancestored towers, put them in a sci-fi reducing machine and placed them on our breakfast tables.

La Conica is available at Details, the Museum of Contemporary Art Book Store, and Lynne Deutch Limited in Los Angeles; Zero Minus Plus in Santa Monica, and Pannikin in San Diego.