Campana Brothers Cork

The Campana Brothers were among Brazil’s foremost contemporary furniture designers. Inspired by their country’s vernacular culture, Humberto and Fernando Campana (b. 1953; 1961–2022) combined everyday objects in unexpected ways — often waste materials like rope, cardboard, plastic tubing, and aluminum wire — to make their singular chairs, decor, lighting and other items. Their designs have been manufactured by such companies as Alessi, Swarovski and Cappellini. And they received numerous honors, including being named Designer of the Year both at Design Miami in 2008, and by Maison & Objet in Paris in 2012.

Humberto Campana was born in Rio Claro in 1953 and earned a bachelor’s degree in law from the University of São Paulo. Fernando was born in 1961 in Brotas, and graduated from the São Paulo School of Fine Arts with a bachelor’s degree in architecture.

The Campana brothers started working together in 1983, crafting furniture using their signature method of adaptive reuse. Their pieces frequently refer to Brazilian social and cultural traditions and entities. Among these are the country’s favelas, or shantytowns, that have grown up around major cities. An homage to the resourcefulness with which the residents of São Paulo’s favelas make use of the materials at hand, repurposing cast-off objects in ingenious designs and constructions, their Favela armchair is made of cast-off strips of wood (the first one was made from discarded slats from a fruit market), which are glued and nailed together seemingly at random. The end result, however, is a compact, solid and well-proportioned chair.

By 1997, some of the Campanas’ pieces were being produced and sold in Italy, including the Edra Vermelha armchair, constructed of cord handwoven around a steel frame. In 1998, the brothers became the first Brazilian designers to have their work exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Today their furniture is included in MoMA’s permanent collection and in those of numerous other major institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Vitra Design Museum.

On 1stDibs, find a collection of Campana Brothers armchairs, case pieces and other furniture.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.

More often than not, vintage mid-century Brazilian furniture designs, with their gleaming wood, soft leathers and inviting shapes, share a sensuous, unique quality that distinguishes them from the more rectilinear output of American and Scandinavian makers of the same era.

Commencing in the 1940s and '50s, a group of architects and designers transformed the local cultural landscape in Brazil, merging the modernist vernacular popular in Europe and the United States with the South American country's traditional techniques and indigenous materials.

Key mid-century influencers on Brazilian furniture design include natives Oscar Niemeyer, Sergio Rodrigues and José Zanine Caldas as well as such European immigrants as Joaquim Tenreiro, Jean Gillon and Jorge Zalszupin. These creators frequently collaborated; for instance, Niemeyer, an internationally acclaimed architect, commissioned many of them to furnish his residential and institutional buildings.

The popularity of Brazilian modern furniture has made household names of these designers and other greats. Their particular brand of modernism is characterized by an émigré point of view (some were Lithuanian, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Portuguese, and Italian), a preference for highly figured indigenous Brazilian woods, a reverence for nature as an inspiration and an atelier or small-production mentality.

Hallmarks of Brazilian mid-century design include smooth, sculptural forms and the use of native woods like rosewood, jacaranda and pequi. The work of designers today exhibits many of the same qualities, though with a marked interest in exploring new materials (witness the Campana Brothers' stuffed-animal chairs) and an emphasis on looking inward rather than to other countries for inspiration.

Find a collection of vintage Brazilian furniture on 1stDibs that includes chairs, sofas, tables and more.

Cork furniture is back — and for good reason: Renewable, recyclable, lightweight, inexpensive and warm, it seems to have no downside.

The versatile material has cycled in and out of fashion in furniture and interior design since its mid-century heyday, when visionary creators from Edward Wormley to Frank Lloyd Wright used it in some of their most famous work.

Today, the wheel has turned once more in cork’s favor, as designers trend toward more eco-friendly options. In addition to its aforementioned attributes and the fact that it is waterproof and highly insulating, the cork oak trees (native to Portugal and Spain) from whose bark it is made are unharmed by the harvesting.

Cork, in short, is more than just a convenient bottle stopper. As the environmental impact becomes an increasingly important consideration, furniture designers are turning to the material in droves.

Shop a wide variety of cork tables, cork seating and other cork furnishings on 1stDibs.