| RESEARCH AND INNOVATION |
Italian design and Cassina together make up a consolidated (and in certain respects taken for granted) two-hander springing from entrepreneurial capacity and intuition honed in the difficult but stimulating period of the post World War second period.
Toward the end of the Forties, Cassina opened up to collaboration with designers operating outside the firm: separation from in-house design marked the progressive passage from artisan to industrial proportions, and start of the research into shape and form and experimentation with different materials which were to turn out to be very fruitful.
The transformation was helped along by
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numerous commissions for ship fittings-out; armchairs produced for these had to have certain constructive characteristics, like structural bulk, the splay of the legs and rigid upholstery necessary for the use to which the furniture had to be put.
Gio Ponti's collaboration was particularly fruitful, both for shape and line and from the technical point of view. His Superleggera chair (1957) would not have been possible without the skill and capacity of experimentation and workmanship of Cassina and its craftsmen. By means of progressive lightening of the structure (a triangular section of just 18 millimeters at the side) and modification of the shape of the struts, a particularly strong chair weighing only 1,66 kilos was achieved.
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Produced and sold for almost fifty years, the Superleggera is a symbol of the dialectical force between the poetics of the designer and the persistence and technological know-how of the Cassina craftsmen.
In the sixties, Cassina took up plastics, and injection or pre-impregnated or expanded materials, which freed furniture from the limits of former paradigms of shape.
The Ciprea armchair (1968), for instance, designed by Afra and Tobia Scarpa, is not upholstered but is formed of a single volume comprising a block of injected expanded polyurethane, with a dacron quilting incorporated in the interchangeable cover.
In the second half of the sixties, radical design made its appearance in Cassina with the
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BracciodiFerro collection, a workshop of ideas in furniture design, which gave substance to new instances and provocation from such designers as Alessandro Mendini and Gaetano Pesce.
In the same cultural climate of dissent and second thoughts the AEO (1973) armchair was conceived, designed by Paolo Deganello – Archizoom, in collaboration with the Cassina Centre of Research and Development. This was the expression of an ideology quite free of conventions. The item can be dismantled, is washable, and compatible with whatever furnishing scheme in that it is totally free of any preceding linguistic references.
AEO provides unquestionable advantages to the user - lightness and convenience; a | |
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combination of characteristics strictly connected to the choice of materials and their experimental and unprejudiced use.
A grey injected Durethan base, a stove-enamelled steel framework which wears, like a shirt, the cotton fabric cover forming back and arms, an expanded polyurethane upholstered cushion and polyester padding as a seat.
The introduction of new production technology was the occasion for the abandonment of traditional shapes and forms. In model 932 (1965), designed by Mario Bellini, the upholstery itself becomes the armchair; the rigid bearing framework having been done away with, the upholstery is reduced to a set of two/three/four cushions, independently finished, assembled and held together | |
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by a kind of belt.
The Le Mura (1972) sofa and bed, also by Mario Bellini, derive from research carried out by the Cassina Research Centre into the technique of cold moulded plastic foam, which followed experiments in differentiated cold foaming to meet different needs of softness and structural strength.
On the other hand, the Break chair (1976), again by Mario Bellini, is made of panels with a framework of flexible steel done in high-density polyurethane foam and assembled by means of special hooks at the base and with a full-length zip running along the sides of the panels.
Mario Bellini's CAB chair (1977) represents a milestone in Italian design. It has a skeleton
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of tubular steel and a covering of stitched leather, fastened to the framework with four zips; an integral covering stretched just like a skin over a metal framework, in a relationship of structural and organic harmony. It's a technical and formal innovation, a chair still in production and quite uselessly imitated.
Innovation is sometimes defined in a movement.
This happens in the case of Vico Magistretti's Maralunga (1973) (the version where a simple movement transforms the back into a headrest) and in Wink (1980) by Toshiyuki Kita, to be used as armchair or chaise longue simply by moving the base unit forward.
Wink has an adjustable back, too, and a headrest divided into two parts, each one | |
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individually adjustable.
With Gaetano Pesce, Cassina tried out the idea of the "indiviual unit in mass production". The details of the shape of the Sit Down (1975) chairs change, in fact, from one example to another, while still maintaining the same aspect of the whole. Polyurethane foam gets used in a simpler way to make various pieces of a series, similar but not identical.
Upholstered items are done in a single block of expanded polyurethane injected in a mould in which polyester padding is spread and the bearing steel framework reinforced with straps is placed. The injected polyurethane fills the mould freely and spontaneously, forming an outline wherever it meets up with spaces in the back unit or the seat, thereby producing a | |
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different shape each time.
In his Sansone table (1980), Pesce works with cast moulded polyester resin. The three versions available - almost rectangular, almost square and almost round - come in a combination of white/red/green, each piece different.
Research into new materials and new technology leads on to I Feltri (1987)in which Pesce uses thick, heavy felt stiffened with thermosetting resin to obtain highly original and individual armchairs. The interiors are covered with quilting, removable and held in place by press-fasteners. The seat is linked to the framework by cotton straps which also edge the soft upper part of the seat.
In 1990 Cassina's design strategy veered to | |
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the definition of the concept of the product able to correspond with new styles of life and living, and collaboration with certain designers allowed the firm to redefine certain types of furniture and develop others not yet in production.
"Every manufacturer dreams of discovering a product capable of lasting from ten to twenty years!... An innovative model satisfying the latent needs of his potential clientele is everyone's dream, but it is still more complex to reach in a fairly simple technological sector, like furniture. Technological innovation, in fact, is not sufficient to allow of the renewal of existing products...".
Solutions have to be found that are "real paths of development through research and
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experimentation in new ways of living."
These lines, taken from an interview granted in the autumn 2003, synthesise the work carried out by the firm in the past ten years.
Faithful to its own history, Cassina continues to build up a collection open to more contributions and different design languages, giving space to research into products that are not merely new but also innovative in their use.
For example, it is to Philippe Starck that we owe L.W.S (Lazy Working Sofa) and S.W. B. (Sleepy Working Bed), two systems that suggest different ways of using the sofa and the bed, and M.I.S.S. (Music Image Sofa System), a system built around the idea of bringing about fusion between domestic technologies | |
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and furnishing, a concept presented on the occasion of the Milan Furniture Fair of 2002 and reaching its definitive formulation in 2004.
A crucial and delicate point for the satisfactory outcome of the industrial process is the choice of designers with whom to entrust the creation of new products. As is explained by the Research and Development Centre: "The choice of these figures is simple and complex at the same time.
After a trial hinging on a particular project, Cassina always seeks to prolong the collaboration. In effect, our scope over the time is to develop a kind of reciprocal trust with all our associates, based on credibility, shared experience and methods of working. This | |
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reciprocal trust explains, no doubt, the small percentage (under 20%) of projects that are not eventually produced. The duration of their development depends upon the complexity of the project.
Cassina works on different projects in the course of a year, five or six of which are presented to the public and then inserted in the permanent collection.
Cassina is not just a manufacturer, but an industry created to produce what it presents!"
The Research and Development Centre is the real link between Cassina and its designers, between the concept and the final product. Over the past decade, such designers as Philippe Starck, Piero Lissoni, Hannes Wettstein, Jorge Pensi, Jehs+Laub, Patrick
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| Jouin and Jean Marie Massaud and many others have entered to form part of the Cassina collection. | |