Superstudio Coffee and Cocktail Tables

Round coffee table in lacquered wood with lamp in the middle. The table can turn on itself. Wear due to time and age of the table.

A low round-shaped coffee table model Bazaar with structure in white lacquered wood and ABS, the table presents an inner light implant. Designed by Superstudio and produced by Giovannetti in 1968, Italy. Literature: AA. VV. Dal cucchiaio alla città nell'itinerario di 100 designers, p. 192, Electa, 1983. Superstudio was an avant-garde architecture and design collective founded in 1966 in Florence, Italy by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia. Other members included Roberto and Alessandro Magris, Piero Frassinelli and Alessandro Poli. Their work consisted principally of photo-collages, films and exhibitions in which they used a radical Utopian approach to criticize the Modernist thinking in design and architecture. "In the beginning we designed objects for production, designs to be turned into wood and steel, glass and brick or plastic - then we produced neutral and usable designs, then finally negative utopias, forewarning images of the horrors which architecture was laying in store for us with its scientific methods for the perpetuation of existing models." This was how Superstudio described its work in a catalogue the group produced to accompany the 1973 exhibition Fragments From A Personal Museum at the Neue Galerie in Graz, Austria. Superstudio was then at the fulcrum of avant garde thinking in architecture and design. Ever since it first surfaced in 1966 at the Superarchitecture exhibition in the Italian town of Pistoia, Superstudio challenged the modernist orthodoxies that had dominated architectural thinking for decades. By questioning architecture's ability to change the world for the better and the boundless faith in technology expressed by earlier, more optimistic groups such as Archigram in the UK, Superstudio raised issues which have preoccupied successive generations of architects and designers from Studio Alchymia in late 1970s Italy and to the Memphis collective in the mid-1980s, to contemporary figures like Rem Koolhaas and Foreign Office Architects. In the early days Superstudio clung to the conventional wisdom that architecture could be a powerful – and positive – force for progress. By 1968, the group had dismissed this notion as improbably optimistic. The following year Superstudio unveiled The Continuous Monument project in which the apparently endless framework of a black-on-white grid - which was to become the group's best known motif - extends across the earth’s surface in a critique of what Superstudio saw as the absurdities of contemporary urban planning. The group created photo-collages to show the grid cloaking the Rocky Coast, Coketown and Manhattan. In 1970, Superstudio then revived the grid – its "neutral surface" – in a collection of furniture manufactured by the Italian company Zanotta. Designed in stark, geometric forms and covered in the ABET plastic laminate traditionally associated with cheap cafés and 1950s coffee bars, its Quaderna tables...

Midcentury "Quaderna" coffee table or bench by Superstudio, Italy, circa 1972. The Quaderna series represents the radical design movement of the late 1960s. Franco Raggi wrote (in...

Rare iconic coffee or couch table designed by the Italian radical design group Superstudio, for Zanotta, 1970. Table laminate finish with 3 cm square grid motif. Labelled Zanotta in ...

Rare iconic coffee or couch table designed by the Italian radical design group Superstudio, for Zanotta, 1970. Table laminate finish with 3 cm square grid motif. Labelled Zanotta in ...

An iconic piece designed by Superstudio for Zanotta in the 1970s.

Created in the 1960s to affect a sense of orderliness, it goes together with the Sofo sofa, with the same length as the seat and half the width, this coffee table is made by bending ...

Rare ,beautiful illuminated and revolving 'Bazaar' sofa table designed by the famous radical Florentine architect's group 'Superstudio' in 1968. This table was originally designed to accompany the iconic radical Superstudio 'Bazaar' sofa and is a wonderful timeless cross between a Space Age flying saucer motif referencing the earlier neoplastic & constructivist arts and the later Minimalist sculpture of artists such as Sol LeWitt. This wonderful sculptural form features a segmented ,painted wood, outer perimeter for storage and an internal circular illuminated opaline plexiglass drum Luminaire with a raised rolled edge detail (also produced in a yellow plexiglass version) which emits a beautiful ethereal lighting...