After 8 September 1943, during the draft service, to avoid deportation to Germany, he moved away from Italy and moved to Switzerland where he had the opportunity to follow some academic courses at the Champ Universitaire Italien in Lausanne, established in the local university. . During his stay in the Swiss city he met Ernesto Nathan Rogers, founder of the BBPR study who was refugee in Switzerland because of racial laws. This will be a key meeting for the intellectual and professional training of Magistretti, who recognizes his master in the Trieste architect. In 1945 he returned to Milan, where on August 2 he graduated in Architecture from the Polytechnic. He began his professional career immediately, together with the architect Paolo Chessa, in the studio of his father, Pier Giulio, who died prematurely in the same year. Here, in the small paternal studio, he will work all his life with the collaboration of a single extraordinary person, the surveyor Franco Montella.
Vico Magistretti carries out his professional activity dealing with architecture, urban planning, industrial design. The first recognition for his work was obtained in 1948, winning the Grand Prix of the VIII Triennale. After this at least forty other awards and recognitions for the various sectors of activity reward Vico Magistretti's work in various countries. He holds lectures and conferences in various architecture faculties and design schools in Italy and abroad, from Milan to New York, from Paris to London, a city to which he is particularly attached and where he is "Honorary Fellow" of the Royal College of Art since 1983. The furniture, lamps and objects he designed are found all over the world and the most important design museums have dedicated exhibitions and welcomed his works in their permanent collections. He continues his research in design, in the culture of the project and in the innovative experimentation of materials, spatial solutions, as well as forms and functions far removed in their rigor from the fashions that have gone through the last decades. He has been designing for Cassina since 1960 and has signed numerous products, including the Maralunga sofa (1973) and the Nuvola Rossa bookcase (1977) which are still unquestionably international bestsellers and which have created hordes of "sympathizers" who are not however managed to scratch the success of the originals. Among the most intense collaborations to be mentioned, the one with De Padova with which he will be able to produce furnishings such as the Louisiana Armchair and the Vidun Table and lamps that always include a reflection on the innovative use of the material, in particular plastics and wood, the result of application of technology or craftsmanship devoted to industry. All with an elegant and recognizable character, they have a sculptural matrix and balanced geometric composition of lines, shapes and functionality that does not give up comfort, use and aesthetics, through small and large inventions, most often precursors of a dynamic idea and transversal of the environments to be lived in freedom.