Poggi Shelves

Modernist Italian Bookcase, designed by Franco Albini and Franca Helg for Poggi, Italy, circa 1950s. This library is believed to be Model LB7 or LB8 and is comprised of four uprights...

LB7 bookcase, designed by Franco Albini and manufactured by Poggi in 1957. Modular bookstore composed by upholds, containers with flying and doors, shelve. The industrial standard for every product component allows permanent and different solutions, from the bearing structures to the elements. The structure does not need anchorages to the wall and can be placed in the middle of the space. This set is composed of 3 modules, ten shelves, and three containers. It is made of Rosewood, iron, and brass. Excellent vintage condition. Franco Albini was born in Robbiate in 1905, and after his childhood and part of his youth, he moved to Milan. He graduated at Politecnico of Milan, Faculty of Architecture, in 1929, and He collaborated for three years in Giò Ponti and Emilio Lancia’s office. He probably had his international contacts here, at The International Exposition of 1929 in Barcelona and Paris, where he visited le Corbusier’s office, as Franca Helg used to tell. Throughout these first three years, his works were undoubtedly related to XIXth Century. His meeting with Edoardo Persico marks an evident turnover towards rationalism and writers for “Casabella” magazine. Persico’s thoughtful and ironical comments on some of Albini’s drawings for office furniture caused him deep upsetting. “I spent days of real anxiety – tells Albini – I had to answer all questions. I had a long fever”. The new phase that the meeting provoked begins with opening his own first office at Via Panizza with Renato Camus and Giancarlo Palanti. The group of Architects starts taking care of social housing, participating in the competition for the Baracca neighborhood in 1932, and then realizing the Ifacp neighborhood: Fabio Filzi (1936/38), Gabriele D’Annunzio, and Ettore Ponti (1939). During those years, He also worked for his first private villa (Pestarini). It is mainly in the context of exhibitions that the Italian architect experiments the compromise between rigor and poetic fantasy that Pagano was talking about; He conceived all the elements that would become recurrent in all types of his work – Architecture, Interiors, Design. The 1933 opening of the new Triennale of Milano, in Palazzo dell’Arte, becomes an occasion to express the highly innovative character of rationalist thinking. In this place, to experiment with new materials and solutions, but most of all a “method”. Young rationalist architects cultivated the art of exhibiting as a communication lab, an open field to space solutions. Albini, with Giancarlo Palanti, sets the steel structure house (with R. Camus, G. Mazzoleni, G. Minoletti and coordination by G. Pagano) designing also its furniture. For the next Triennale in 1936, marked by Persico’s early death, Franco Albini, together with a group of young architects around Pagano, takes care of the exhibition of Dwelling, where he presented 3 types of lodgings. In the same year, Albini and Romano design the exhibition for Ancient Italian jewelry: vertical uprights, simple linear poles design space. This element is recurring in other works, like the Scipione exhibition (1941), Vanzetti stand (1942), and Olivetti shop in Paris (1956). The architectural space is readable through a grid, introducing a third dimension, the vertical one, with a sense of lightness and transparency. Upright is also used in design objects, such as the Veliero bookcase...