Cassina, where the ideas of the great masters become works of design
Cassina is one of the oldest companies on the Italian furniture scene and is a Company that has made research, quality and rigor its stylistic hallmark, becoming synonymous with care for beauty. It is a success story that since the second half of the 20th century has been rewriting the canons of the approach to design, thanks in part to the encounter with the great artists of design, first and foremost Gio Ponti. From that moment, the intuition of a real philological work of understanding the Great Masters of Architecture and rediscovering the roots of contemporary furniture, the precursors, the archetypes, the forerunners of a new way of designing furniture objects, with the aim of reissuing a new manifesto of modern living.
Thus was born in 1965, with the first acquisitions of reproduction rights, the I Maestri collection where the most iconic artistic works of the protagonists of the Modern Movement, essential landmarks of modern design, are collected and selected. The philosophy that is the inspiration is the recovery of archetypal and interpretive codes that underlie the development of contemporary design and architecture. The creations of the past are, yes, actualized but without ever losing anything of the original spirit and the messages launched by the Great Masters.
It is a collection that tends toward the absolute in expression and values. It transcends space and time by uniting the past, present and future of living.
From Le Corbusier, the first inspirer of the collection, to Pierre Janneret and Charlotte Perriand, to Frank Lloyd Wright, Franco Albini and many others, the I Maestri collection is, among other things, a treat for the eye and a continuous stimulus, including intellectual stimulation. Like the proposals of Marco Zanuso, who with the Lady armchair and sofa opens to the plane of stylistic and material innovation, while Luisa by Franco Albini is substance in form and poetic in archetype. All to be studied.
Marco Zanuso’s Lady armchair and sofa, the iconic style spanning a century in black and white
The Lady armchair, designed in 1951 by Marco Zanuso, immediately established itself as an icon of Italian design in the 1950s, proving to be an authentic Made in Italy masterpiece capable of winning the Gold Medal at the IX Milan Triennale in 1951. The re-edition by Cassina in 2015, while enhancing its aesthetics according to a more contemporary taste, preserves and enhances the fundamental insights of the original idea of Lady, namely its extraordinary modernity in construction that represented an absolute novelty in terms of style, material and technology.
From a structural point of view, the armchair features an innovative spring system obtained with reinforced elastic straps to achieve the highest level of comfort while also being able to rely on armrests made of poplar plywood. The slender metal legs are so slender that they enhance the lightness of the forms, while the feet are made of black plastic material. Lady was the first armchair to be upholstered in polyurethane foam and foam rubber, and all the elements that make up its structure harmoniously match to make it a true masterpiece.
Cassina preserves all this and does even more by offering in the upholstery the option of choosing the precious selection of fabrics signed by Raf Simons to enrich even more the value of this timeless product.
But Lady does not end there. This armchair is joined, also designed by Zanusi, by a proposed two-seater sofa that Cassina decided to reissue in 2016. The Lady sofa has the same features as the armchair: both the seat and the backs and sides are made separately just to grasp and adapt to all the characteristics of the body, ensuring maximum comfort.
The signature touch of the Lady sofa is the wide choice of fabrics available for upholstery that give even more character to this product. One above all: the iconic black-and-white checkerboard, imagery and symbol of an era.
832 Luisa di Franco Albini, the art of wood and the substance of form.
Franco Albini carried out a long and complex work of research and experimentation before arriving at the final outline of what is the Luisa armchair, the ideal model, the archetype that substantiated in itself the fundamental and essential elements of the chair and that in 1955 won him the Compasso d’Oro ADI award. From these premises, Luisa expresses the poetics of substance and form that succeeds in creating a code of both representation and use that, for more than half a century, has withstood unscathed the changing conceptions of living.
Structurally, wood plays an important and fundamental role: in fact, it is possible to make Luisa’s supporting structure in three different wood variants ranging from Natural or Black-stained Ash to Canaletto Walnut. Again, as in Lady, there are elastic straps within the seat and back profile, while the upholstery is composed of cold-foamed polyurethane foam covered in fabric or leather. The geometric planes that are created remain suspended and supported by a thin wooden structure with trestle sides, a recurring feature in Albini’s work.
And Cassina makes this lightness its own, reinterpreting it through the extraordinary woodworking skills of its craftsmen to prove that Luisa is truly a timeless object. It is form is matter. And because of this, eternal and archetypal.
