Franco Albini Mid-century Italian Armchair Model "Fiorenza" walnut cream fabric
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Franco Albini Mid-century Italian Armchair Model "Fiorenza" walnut cream fabric
About the Item
- Creator:Arflex (Manufacturer),Franco Albini (Designer)
- Design:
- Dimensions:Height: 40.56 in (103 cm)Width: 36.23 in (92 cm)Depth: 28.75 in (73 cm)Seat Height: 16.54 in (42 cm)
- Style:Mid-Century Modern (Of the Period)
- Materials and Techniques:
- Place of Origin:
- Period:
- Date of Manufacture:1952
- Condition:Wear consistent with age and use.
- Seller Location:Barcelona, ES
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU237436174103
Franco Albini
While working under the polymath Gio Ponti — arguably the most important figure in 20th-century Italian modernism — furniture designer Franco Albini nurtured a love for modern forms combined with traditional craft techniques.
Albini is widely known for working with organic materials such as rattan and cane for his chairs and other seating, but he also played a pivotal role in the Italian rationalist movement of the early 20th century, which saw architects and furniture makers applying a strict emphasis on geometry in their work. Rationalists drew on Ancient Roman architecture but rejected ornament, much in the way that Le Corbusier and celebrated Bauhaus figures such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had in their modernist furniture.
Albini received his degree in architecture from the Polytechnic University of Milan in 1929, and, in 1931, he founded his practice in Milan, where he tackled workers’ housing and other reconstruction projects. A gifted urban planner, he also developed the Palazzo Bianco, Palazzo Rosso and Tesoro di San Lorenzo museums in Genoa. While Albini is revered for his Margherita chair — a Triennale Milano award winner created for Bonacina in 1951 — he also collaborated with manufacturers Poggi and Cassina in the 1940s on seating, tables and more that embodied his artistic vision. Of that mid-century work, the one piece that perhaps best captures this vision is the iconic Luisa chair.
With its cherry red upholstery and sinuous wooden legs that seem to float aboveground, the Luisa is a genuine masterpiece. It is also a testament to Albini’s perfectionism, as it endured several prototypes — including one made by Knoll in the late 1940s — and took approximately 15 years to design. Poggi launched the final version of the armchair in 1955, earning Albini the prestigious Compasso d’Oro from Italy’s Association for Industrial Design. It is produced today by Cassina. Albini named the chair for someone who likely saw the process firsthand: his personal secretary of two decades, Luisa Colombini.
Find vintage Franco Albini furniture on 1stDibs.
Arflex
From its unorthodox beginnings, Italian manufacturer Arflex grew into one of the leaders of 20th-century furniture design. Its furniture came to be known for its integration of new materials and bold appeal, and today a variety of vintage Arflex chairs, sofas and tables are emblems of mid-century modernism.
Arflex was established in Milan in 1947 by Pirelli employees Carlo Barassi, Pio Reggiani, Renato Teani and Aldo Bai. Barassi, a Milan Polytechnic graduate and visionary engineer at the Italian tire manufacturer, explored innovative technology and new uses for synthetic materials in domestic products (for Kartell, he codeveloped a ski rack for automobiles). The four founders partnered with a young architect named Marco Zanuso, who also desired to create furniture that featured an application of novel materials such as elastic tape and polyurethane foam.
One of Arflex’s inaugural pieces was Zanuso’s Lady armchair, a seat made of polyurethane foam that was manufactured in pieces and assembled at the very end of the production process. It won a gold medal at the 1951 Milan Triennale. A couple of years later, Arflex collaborated with Studio BBPR to create the office-chic Elettra and Neptunia chairs. The flourishing furniture company quickly established a reputation for compelling products and attracting and working with up-and-coming designers such as Roberto Menghi, who created Hall, a luxurious line of seating that would earn the Compasso d’Oro – Honorable Mention in 1959.
In the 1960s, Arflex continued to welcome the use of new and cutting-edge materials. Popular designs from this decade include Carlo Bartoli's fiberglass and polyester resin Gaia lounge chair and Cini Boer’s Bobo Relax lounger, one of history’s first seating pieces made of polyurethane foam (it has no internal frame). Boer, a pioneer of furniture design in Italy, also created the Strips sofa for the brand in 1972. Part of a plush modular seating system, the Strips sofa became an Arflex icon and was awarded the Compasso d'Oro in 1979.
Arflex continues to work with innovative designers to this day. Among their more recent collaborations is with Swedish design studio Claesson Koivisto Rune. The company's legendary creations are also on display at museums worldwide. The Lady chair, for example, is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
On 1stDibs, you can find a collection of vintage Arflex lounge chairs, armchairs, coffee tables and other furniture.
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- Franco Albini Mahogany mid-centry Italian Table Model TL-22 produced by PoggiBy Franco AlbiniLocated in Barcelona, ESFranco Albini & Franca Helg. Dining table model no. TL22. Manufactured by Poggi, Italy, 1958. Mahogany. Measurements: 180.3 cm x 104.1 cm x 73 H cm. 70.98 in x 40.98 in x 28.74 in. Literature: Giuliana Gramigna, Repertorio 1950/1980, Milan, 1985, p. 123. Franco Albini, was born in 1905 and died in 1977. He spent his childhood and part of his youth in Robbiate in Brianza, where he was born. Albini, as an adolescent moved with his family to Milan. Here he enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic and graduated in 1929. He started his professional activity in the studio of Gio Ponti and Emilio Lancia, with whom he collaborated for three years. At the 1929 International Exhibition in Barcelona (where Gio Ponti curated the Italian pavilion and Mies van der Rohe realized that of Germany) and in Paris where, as Franca Helg recounted, he had the opportunity to visit the studio by Le Corbusier. In those three years, the works he carried out are admittedly of the twentieth century imprint. It is the meeting with Edoardo Persico that marked a clear turning point towards rationalism and the approach to the group of editors of "Casabella". The partly ironic and partly very harsh comments of the Neapolitan critic to a series of drawings, made by Albini for the design of some office furniture, caused him a great disturbance. “I spent days of real anguish - Albini recalls - I had to answer all the questions. I also had a fever, a large and long fever. " The meted provoked Albini to openen a professional studio in via Panizza with Renato Camus and Giancarlo Palanti. The group of architects began to deal with public housing by participating in the competition for the Baracca district in San Siro in 1932 and then building the IFACP neighborhoods: Fabio Filzi (1936/38), Gabriele D'Annunzio and Ettore Ponti (1939). During this period, Albini also worked on his first villa (Pestarini), which Giuseppe Pagano, architect and critic of the time, presented as follows: “This coherence, which the superficial rhetoric of fashionable jugglers calls intransigence, and which is instead the basis of understood between the fantasy of art and the reality of the craft, in Franco Albini, it is so rooted that it transforms theory into a moral attitude ". But it is above all in the context of the exhibitions that the Milanese master experienced his compromise between that "rigor and poetic fantasy" of which Pagano speaks, coining the elements that became a recurring theme in his . The opening in 1933 of the new Triennale headquarters in Milan, in the Palazzo dell'Arte, was an important opportunity to express the strong innovative character of rationalist thinking, a gym in which to freely experiment with new materials and new solutions, but above all a "method". "Cultivated as a communication laboratory, the art of setting up was for the rationalists of the first generation what the perspective had been for the architects of humanism: the field open to a hypothesis of space that needed profound reflections before landing the concreteness of the construction site ". Together with Giancarlo Palanti, Albini on the occasion of the V Triennale di Milano set up the steel structure house (with R. Camus, G. Mazzoleni, G. Minoletti and with the coordination of G. Pagano), for which he also designed the 'furniture. 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