Zanotta

Zanotta is the company that, more than any other, put into production the boldest ideas of Italian design in the 1960s and 1970s. An inflatable armchair, a sack full of beads, a tractor seat turned into a stool: objects that other companies would have thought impossible to sell, and that are now in museums all over the world.

Aurelio Zanotta

The company was founded in 1954 by the young entrepreneur Aurelio Zanotta, with its factory in Nova Milanese, where it still is today. At first it was called Zanotta Poltrona and made fairly traditional upholstered furniture. But by the early 1960s the founder, curious and open to the avant-garde, had begun to work with Achille Castiglioni and his brother Pier Giacomo, Gae Aulenti, Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini. In 1965 Zanotta was among the first companies to use frameless polyurethane foam, in Willie Landels's Throw Away series of sofas and armchairs.

Blow and Sacco

In 1967 came Blow, the first mass-produced inflatable armchair, in clear PVC, designed by Jonathan De Pas, Donato D'Urbino, Paolo Lomazzi and Carla Scolari. The following year brought the Sacco by Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini and Franco Teodoro: a large sack filled with polystyrene beads that takes the shape of whoever sits in it. It was the first beanbag chair in history, a symbol of Pop design and of a new freedom in the way people sat; it is on show in dozens of museums, from MoMA to the Victoria and Albert Museum, and in 2020 it received the Compasso d'Oro.

Rediscovered classics

From the 1970s Zanotta also produced designs that had been born too early for industry. In 1971 it added to its catalogue the Castiglionis' Mezzadro, conceived in 1957: a painted sheet-metal tractor seat mounted on a steel leaf spring and a wooden crosspiece. It later reissued the tubular steel Lariana chair designed in 1936 by Giuseppe Terragni, a master of Italian Rationalism. Award-winning products include the folding Sciangai coat stand by De Pas, D'Urbino and Lomazzi (Compasso d'Oro 1979), inspired by the game of pick-up sticks, and the Tonietta chair by Enzo Mari (Compasso d'Oro 1987). Gae Aulenti designed dozens of pieces for Zanotta between 1963 and 1986.

Experiment and the present

In 1983 Zanotta set up Zabro, an experimental division led by Mendini and Alessandro Guerriero, close to the Alchimia group and to Postmodernism: it produced Mendini's Dorifora chair and Andrea Branzi's Animali domestici (Domestic Animals). In 1989 came Zanotta Edizioni, small series halfway between art and design. After the founder's death in 1991 the company was run by his family; in 2023 it was acquired by Cassina and joined the Haworth Lifestyle group. Its catalogue now includes more than two hundred products, by masters and contemporary designers.

Sources

• Wikipedia – Zanotta (it)
• Wikipedia – Zanotta (en)