COMPANY
Cassina works industrially in the contemporary furnishing sector.
It produces chairs, tables, armchairs, beds, and furniture in general with a particular flair for upholstered items and work in wood, leather and other top-quality materials.
The Cassina collection is eclectic, and has always been so. It is open to design projects from varying cultures and historical backgrounds, it welcomes them and makes them its own, stamping them with its own personality, its own trademark.
Cassina - Space
HISTORY
BEGINNING, THE FIFTIES
The “Amedeo Cassina” firm first saw the light of day officially at Meda (Milano) in 1927, on the initiative of the brothers Cesare and Umberto Cassina. The name was modified in 1935 to “Figli di Amedeo Cassina”.
At the outset practically the entire outputs was made up of small pieces of wooden furniture - small work-tables and living-room tables - being later extended to include armchairs and drawing-room furniture.
The first Cassina furniture was eclectic in inspiration, but the melange of styles soon gave way to the generic middle-of-the-road.
Imm Cassina
20th century style. These were years of great crisis and it was thanks to this amplification of activity that the young firm was able to keep its head above water and not succumb to the difficulties that beset the sector and the economy of the entire state.
The furniture that Cassina produced was for the most part fitted; it was often made for specific destinations and sometimes resulted in small serial production runs.
CASSINA AND THE BIRTH
OF ITALIAN DESIGN
After the war, Cassina continued to expand in size, fame and above all in excellence, thanks to the acknowledged quality of the products,
which by this time covered the whole furniture range; chairs, armchairs, tables, smaller chairs, sofas and beds.
Years followed on rich in experience and result, marked by the beginning of the firm’s collaboration with external designers, bringing with them a wide range of research values. The first was the architect Franco Albini whose little mod.430 armchairs (1948), rigorous and essential in their lines of construction, went against current trends and showed an attention and commitment towards a compositional research aimed more at innovation.
The conviction was rooted that numbers and organization were not in themselves sufficient, and that it is quality that represents he best guarantee of a product’s success and long life.
Italian design was in the process of being born, and Cassina was among the architects of the phenomenon.
Separation of the procedures of design and production was for the firm the sign of passage from its initial crafts vocation to the industrial.Cassina was for research and experiment, but primed with the crafts tradition of which it is a master. The transformation was nourished by a large number of commissions for ship fittings-out, which – together with furniture for hotels and restaurants and other places created for the accommodation of guests – accounted for the greater part of the firm’s activity right up to the mid-sixties and beyond.
SHIP FURNISHINGS
One of the first ships that Cassina had a hand in fitting out was the Anna C. (1947), the first passenger ship of the Costa line (and the commission went on for the furniture and fittings of successive ships of the Costa line). In those years, Italy was busy reconstructing its own transatlantic fleet.
Gio Ponti and Nino Zoncada, both mindful of the lessons of Gustavo Pulitzer, were among the more active designers engaged in creating the furnishings of these new ships.
For the ill-fated turbo-craft Andrea Doria (1952), built at Genova Sestri in the Ansaldo shipyard, Zoncada and Ponti designed the furniture of the saloon, the ball-room, the
great bar and the winter garden of the first class, furniture that was supplied by Cassina.There followed furnishings for the Michelangelo (1065), Cristoforo Colombo and Gripsholm. The armchairs made for these schemes were particular in their constructional details, such as the bulk of their structure, the splay of the legs and the rigid upholstery in strict keeping with their use and to the stresses that they had to withstand.
FURNITURE FOR PUBLIC PLACES
Cassina’s activity in the sector of complete furnishing schemes and interiors for public premises, events or special exhibitions took on a particular relevance from the beginning
of the fifties.This was an important sector and a crucial one for the company’s growth.
This growth regarded the level of average production, also from the quantitative aspect.
The sheer extent of work done led the firm to undertake an internal reorganisation, to allow articles to be mass-produced in less time but with the same high-quality result.
Amongst the more noteworthy furnishing schemes in this category are the San Remo Casinò, the Saint Vincent Casinò, the different branches of the Motta Bar in Milan, the Savini restaurant in Milan, the Hotel Europa Palace in Anacapri, the Hotel Royal in Naples, and the Hotel Diana in Milan.
CASSINA AND GIO PONTI
Cassina’s activity in the fifties is firmly bound up with the creative genius of Gio Ponti.
In the furnishing schemes that he produced during these years there seem to be two opposite trends; on the one hand there is the classicism evident in the decorated furniture designed in collaboration with Piero Fornasetti, and on the other a growing tendency towards modernism, towards “slim-lined, light” objects.
The slender, taut line of the side of the Distex chair (mod. 807, 1953) reflects quite clearly the evolution of Ponti’s design poetics. Made with the arms full of acute geometrical angles, and with wooden feet, another versionhad
egs/arms in metal. In this latter version it was used by Ponti in his furnishing for the “Uni-environmental Living Space” for the 10th Triennale in Milan.
The Distex chair is exemplary and symptomatic of the production of upholstered furniture at this time in its use of foam rubber and elastic webbing, which by now have taken the place of the traditional sprung upholstery, and new materials like vinyl simulated leather, vipla and flexa for the covering.
LIGHT CHAIRS
Gio Ponti’s mod. 646 chair, called the Leggera, represents the intermediary moment of that design process on the theme of a modern mass-produced chair which led eventually to the mod. 699, the Superleggera, one of the archetypes of Italian design.
In 1949 there appeared in Domus (240) a chair in painted ash wood, containing what seemed the spore of certain formal paradigms of Ponti-type research - such as the folded back and the pointed supports. Cassina put this model into production in 1952. But it was not until 1957 that Ponti’s study of the chair - “chair, like chair, just that with no adjectives, that is to say just a chair, but light, slender and reasonable” (Domus 268, 1952) realty came into being. Deriving from of the traditional Ligurian chair of Chiavari, the Superleggera is the indisputable fruit of Gio Ponti’s study and Cassina’s ability and skill in experimentation and working; the structure of the origial Leggera had been progressively lightened and the shape of the supports modified to achieve a solution characterised by a perfect balance of solidity and lightness. The adoption of a triangular section, only 18 mm., in the structure of the legs, and a weight of just 1.66 kg brings the identification of the shape with the structure to its limit. It’s a light chair, but very strong, of which Ponti himself goes on record as having said: “If you go to the Cassina works, they will give you a thrilling show, throwing these chairs about and showing you how they fall to earth and bounce, but never break” (Domus 268, 1952).
Produced and sold for getting on for fifty years, the Superleggera is a symbol of the force of the dialectics between the poetics of the designer and the technological know-how and tenacity of the Cassina craftsmen.
Done in natural or lacquered ash, it’s made nowadays exclusively with the seat in rattan just like its forbears from Chiavari.
THE COMPASSO D’ORO GOES TO
CARLO DE CARLI AND CASSINA
The Compasso d’Oro, the prize that ratified the official birth of Italian design and destined to single out its best results over the years, was awarded for the first time in 1954.
Amongst the winners on this first occasion was the mod. 683 designed by Carlo De Carli for Cassina.
In solid ash wood, redolent of organic references, it has slender tapering legs and an L-shaped feature to support the seat and the back.
These last two, in slender curved ash plywood, seem to wrap around the structural unit, to which they are joined by little wooden spacers. The mod. 683 was awarded the Diploma of Honour at the 10th Milan Triennale, and MoMA’s Good Design prize in New York.
ICO PARISI’S MODERN DESIGN
Another important and fruitful collaboration for Cassina is that with Ico Parisi, one of the leaders of Italian design in the fifties. His furniture is one of the most interesting
interpretations of modern design of the period.
This is borne out by Parisi’s unremitting participation in exhibitions and fittings-out, particularly at the Milan Triennale.
The mod. 691 chair (1956) sums up the typical lines of the period, with its lightness and X-shaped support structure,
modelled on certain organic bone forms, with pointed and tapering tips.
GIANFRANCO FRATTINI’S
SUCCESFUL PRODUCTS
Cassina’s collaboration with Gianfranco Frattini started in 1954. Frattini designed various models (among which,
the armchairs mod.831 and mod. 849 and the chairs mod. 101, mod. 102, mod. 104, mod. 105 and mod. 107) which show the most sensitive and advanced taste of the period, so pieces signed by him go to make up 60% of Cassina production at the beginning of the sixties. The mod. 849 armchair features an evident distancing between the two sections, a clear separation between the wooden trestle of the structure and the back and seat/arm shell; the simple sturdy geometry of the bearing framework contrasts with the flexible curves of the upholstery, which seems to be almost suspended in the air.
Cassina
Paola lenti Atollo For Cassina
Tags: armchair · Cassina · classic · Contemporary Design · Contemporary Furniture · Contemporary Furniture Design · Contemporary Sofas · Corner Sofa · Design · designer · designers · furniture · Furniture Design · inspiration · interior · interiors · Italian Design · leather · Modern · Modern Design · room · Schemes · sofa · style · type · upholsteryView Comments
