B&B Italia

B&B Italia is the company that brought industry into the world of sofas and armchairs. In the 1960s upholstered furniture was still made by hand, with springs, horsehair and sewn padding; at Novedrate, near Como, they began to mould it like car parts.

C&B: Cassina and Busnelli

The company was founded in 1966 as C&B, a partnership between Cesare Cassina, already well known through the family firm Cassina, and the young entrepreneur Piero Ambrogio Busnelli. The idea was to use the most modern technologies to make furniture in large series. Busnelli discovered injection moulding in London and, with a technician from Bayer, developed cold-foamed polyurethane moulded in forms: the first upholstered piece made this way was the Coronado sofa by Afra and Tobia Scarpa, assembled with just two screws.

The chairs that inflate

In 1969 C&B presented the Up series by Gaetano Pesce: frameless polyurethane armchairs, sold compressed and vacuum-sealed in flat packaging, which regain their shape, “inflating”, when the wrapping is opened. The most famous, Up5, has the curves of a female body and is attached to a round footstool that recalls a prisoner's ball and chain: for Pesce, an image of the condition of women. It is one of the symbols of Italian Pop design and Radical design. In 1972 came Le Bambole by Mario Bellini, soft armchairs and sofas with no visible frame, which won the Compasso d'Oro in 1979.

A manifesto factory

For the new headquarters in Novedrate, Busnelli turned to two young architects, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. The building, finished in 1973, is a volume suspended inside a structure of coloured steel tubes and glass: it anticipates the High-tech style of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which the same architects were then designing. That same year Busnelli bought out Cassina's share and the company took the name B&B Italia; according to a joke by the founder, the first B stood for the banks that had helped him.

From Citterio to today

From the 1980s the house designer was above all Antonio Citterio, whose Sity seating system won the Compasso d'Oro in 1987; the following year the prize went to the company as a whole. Later came Patricia Urquiola, with the Bend sofa and the Husk armchair, Naoto Fukasawa and Barber & Osgerby. In 2015 the Busnelli family sold a majority stake to the Investindustrial fund; since 2018 B&B Italia has been part of the same group as Flos and the Danish firm Louis Poulsen, now called Design Holding. The Maxalto and Arclinea brands also belong to the group.

Sources

• Wikipedia – B&B Italia (it)
• Wikipedia – B&B Italia (en)