PurplePrice Mag · · 2 min read
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FontanaArte is the company that brought glass into Italian design: lamps, small tables, mirrors and vases in curved, ground and blown crystal, some of which have been in production for almost a century. Its history is linked to four great art directors: Gio Ponti, Pietro Chiesa, Max Ingrand and Gae Aulenti.
Fontana and Ponti
It all began with Luigi Fontana, who in 1881 founded a company in Milan making sheet glass for building, later controlled by the French group Saint-Gobain. In 1930 Fontana met Gio Ponti, then art director of Richard Ginori, and made him art director. Ponti designed the 0024 pendant (1931), made of stacked glass discs, and the Bilia table lamp, a white glass sphere resting on a metal base. In 1933 Fontana Arte was born, a division devoted to artistic objects in crystal.
Pietro Chiesa
That same year Fontana Arte bought the workshop of the Milanese glassmaker Pietro Chiesa, who on Ponti's suggestion became its art director until his death in 1948. Chiesa designed the Fontana table (1932), made from a single 15-millimetre sheet of crystal, curved and ground, the Cartoccio vase, which looks like a rolled-up sheet of paper, and the Luminator floor lamp (1933), with indirect light.
Ingrand and Aulenti
After the war direction passed to the French glass artist Max Ingrand, who moved the company towards industrial production and in 1954 designed the Fontana table lamp, with base and shade in white satin glass, still in production today. After difficult years, in 1979 Saint-Gobain sold the company to a group of entrepreneurs, who gave the art direction to Gae Aulenti. In 1980 Aulenti designed the Tavolo con ruote, a sheet of glass resting on four industrial castors, and with Piero Castiglioni the Parola lamp. Pierluigi Cerri, Daniela Puppa and Franco Raggi worked with her.
FontanaArte today
Gae Aulenti died in 2012, the year of the company's eightieth anniversary; since 2010 it had belonged to the industrial group Nice. In the following years designers such as Gabriele and Oscar Buratti and Francesco Librizzi worked for FontanaArte. At the end of 2024 it joined the NEMO group, together with Driade.
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