Franco Albini and Franca Helg Table TL22 Wood Poggi, Italy, circa 1958

Modern sideboard by Franco Albini for Poggi - 1950s Italy. This design features a simplistic aesthetic with sharp lines. It has four compartments with doors. The sculptural legs giv...

This large wooden table consists of a strong and compact top. The metal legs, lacquered in black, are built according to the lines of the wooden to...

This big round table designed by Sandro Petti for Metalarte balances perfectly all its materials, from red marble to brass and glass, to convey a refin...

This immense table was designed by Pierluigi Colli in Turin, further on the Alps and the shady expanses of forests and rivers that make it up. The table is an absolute example of thi...

Designed by Ross Littell for ICF De Padova in 1970s, this Model "Luar" table perfectly matches aesthetics and function. With its sleek design and peculiar metallic check top, this it...

This coffee table in wood, lacquered wood and glass top was designed by Vittorio Valabrega and produced in Italy during the 1940s. Its structure consisting of three legs in black la...

Beautiful model 'TL22' dining table by Franco Albini and Franca Helg for Poggi, from 1958. The architects Albini and Helg worked together on a large number of projects from 1951 unti...

Desk model TL22, designed by Franco Albini and Franca Helg and manufactured by Poggi in 1958. Table completely restored. Wood: walnut. Letteratura: Gramigna G., Repertorio del desig...

Wooden dining table TL22 model by Franco Albini for Poggi 60s. Born in Milan in 1905, Franco Albini is an Italian architect, urban planner and furniture designer, active between the 1930s and 1960s. He studied at the Milan Polytechnic and completed his apprenticeship under the guidance of the architect and designer Gio Ponti, and played a key role in the formulation of the Italian Rationalist movement in the years before the Second World War. Albini works with several well-known mid-century manufacturers, among which Cassina, Arflex, Poggi, Arteluce, Brionvega, and Knoll stand out, and many of his designs are still in production today. He has received many honors for his work, including three Compasso d'Oro. The professional story of the furniture maker Roberto Poggi...

Round table model TL30 with black lacquered metal base and a wooden top. Designed by Franco Albini for Poggi, Pavia in 1950s.   After spending his childhood and part of his youth in Robbiate in Brianza, where he was born in 1905, Franco Albini moved with his family to Milan. Here he enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic and graduated in 1929. He starts his professional activity in the studio of Gio Ponti and Emilio Lancia, with whom he collaborates for three years. He probably had his first international contacts here In those three years, the works carried out are admittedly of a twentieth-century imprint. It was the meeting with Edoardo Persico that marked a clear turning point towards rationalism and the rapprochement with the group of editors of “Casabella”. The new phase that that meeting provoked starts with the opening of the first 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 neighborhood in San Siro in 1932 and then creating the Ifacp neighborhoods: Fabio Filzi (1936/38), Gabriele D’Annunzio and Ettore Ponti (1939). Also in those years Albini worked on his first villa Pestarini. But it is above all in the context of the exhibitions that the Milanese master experiments his compromise between that “rigor and poetic fantasy” coining the elements that will be a recurring theme in all the declinations of his work – architecture, interiors, design pieces . The opening in 1933 of the new headquarters of the Triennale in Milan, in the Palazzo dell’Arte, becomes an important opportunity to express the strong innovative character of rationalist thought, a gym in which to freely experiment with new materials and new solutions, but above all a “method”. Together with Giancarlo Palanti, Albini on the occasion of the V Triennale di Milano sets up the steel structure house, for which he also designs the ‘furniture. At the subsequent Triennale of 1936, marked by the untimely death of Persico, together with a group of young designers gathered by Pagano in the previous edition of 1933, Franco Albini takes care of the preparation of the exhibition of the house, in which the furniture of three types of accommodation. The staging of Stanza per un uomo, at that same Triennale, allows us to understand the acute and ironic approach that is part of Albini, as a man and as a designer: the theme addressed is that of the existenzminimum and the reference of the project is to the fascist myth of the athletic and sporty man, but it is also a way to reflect on low-cost housing, the reduction of surfaces to a minimum and respect for the way of living. In that same year Albini and Romano designed the Ancient Italian Goldsmith’s Exhibition: vertical uprights, simple linear rods, design the space. A theme, that of the “flagpole”, which seems to be the center of the evolution of his production and creative process. The concept is reworked over time, with the technique of decomposition and recomposition typical of Albinian planning: in the setting up of the Scipio Exhibition and of contemporary drawings (1941) the tapered flagpoles, on which the paintings and display cases are hung, are supported by a grid of steel cables; in the Vanzetti stand (1942) they take on the V shape; in the Olivetti store in Paris (1956) the uprights in polished mahogany support the shelves for displaying typewriters and calculators. The reflection on this theme arises from the desire to interpret the architectural space, to read it through the use of a grid, to introduce the third dimension, the vertical one, while maintaining a sense of lightness and transparency. The flagpole is found, however, also in areas other than the exhibition ones. In the apartments he designed, it is used as a pivot on which the paintings can be suspended and rotated to allow different points of view, but at the same time as an element capable of dividing spaces. The Veliero bookcase...

Franco Albini for Poggi, dining table, model TL2, walnut and iron, Italy, 1951. The TL2 table by Franco Albini features a simplistic and sleek design. Executed in darkened walnut wo...

Table designed by Franco Albini in 1953. Relaunched in 2013. Manufactured by Cassina in Italy. Franco Albini designed this table using the strut element that he had already employed in the design of the Veliero and Infinito bookshelves. In this instance, the legs serve as the vertical elements, solid, turned along their entire surface except for the square section onto which the horizontal table...