Andrea Branzi. In the 1960s, in a region such as Tuscany, which produced literally nothing in the field of design, Poltronova had all the best designers on its team: not only Ettore Sottsass, its art director, but also Gae Aulenti, Paolo Portoghesi, Giovanni Michelucci, Angelo Mangiarotti, the Archizoom and Superstudio groups, De-Pas-D’Urbino-Lomazzi;not just the mentors, but also the leading exponents of new design, who were then called radicals…
Moving away fro Dino Gavina and the Danish aristocracy, who created the first niche of top-quality brands in the early 1960s, Sergio Camilli adopted a different experimental method right from the start, by bringing together the polycentric soul of Italian design, and its contradictions and opposing trends. He was convinced – and today we see that he was right – that this complexity was the very source of the unity and vitality of this extraordinary phenomenon. In the same catalogue, Cammilli immediately juxtaposed Archizoom’s anarchic works and Angelo Mangiarotti’s Cub8 (the first Italian «equipped wall»), the postmodern experiments by Paolo Portoghesi and Ettore Sottsass’ irreverent archetypes.
It was as if to say: Everything and the opposite of everything, foreseeing the breaking up of the markets and tastes that ten years later would be called post-industrial.
“Poltronova had all the best on its team.”
The journey has only just begun. Our vision is to keep on introducing furniture from our finest designers, taking an active part in both preserving and developing the Scandinavian design heritage.
