Poltronova

Radical Iconic Italian Design

Mies by Archizoom Associati, 1969. – A small and

Mies by Archizoom Associati, 1969.
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A small and different entrepreneur. Text by Paolo Deganello (Archizoom Associati).
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In 1957, Sergio Cammilli rented a small workshop with three or four upholsterers, in Agliana, a small town outside Pistoia near Quarrata. Since the early 1950s it had been an important production area in post-war Tuscany for cushioned furniture. He called it “Poltronova,” “nova,” or “new,” to make it stand out from the old manufacturing of padded and “traditional” furniture, which at the time reigned supreme in Quarrata. One year later he appointed Ettore Sottsass Art Director of Poltronova. That same year Adriano Olivetti asked Sottsass to work together and eventually replace Nizzoli as AD for his company, too. Olivetti’s factory — the grand Fordist one that in “Olivetti’s vision” [Marco Revelli, Il vento di Adriano. La comunità concreta di Olivetti tra non più e non ancora, Derive Approdi, Rome] was an internal version of Fordism, or “soft Fordism,” able to reconcile mass production with beauty, profit with culture, while putting art at the industry’s service.
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Mies by Archizoom Associati, 1969. – A small and

Mies by Archizoom Associati, 1969.
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A small and different entrepreneur. Text by Paolo Deganello (Archizoom Associati).
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During those years, it found in the tiny provincial Agliana a small entrepreneur named Cammilli. He was certainly far from Olivetti’s vision of the “new community movement” but, in his own small way, aimed to do just the same with his armchairs by using art within the industry to give modernity and technical, production, and above all aesthetic innovation to his armchairs. It’s no coincidence that, back then, he chose the same Art Director as Adriano. Like the graphic designer Nizzoli and the architect, ceramicist, and photographer Ettore Sottsass, Cammilli, too, came from the art world.
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Mies by Archizoom Associati, 1969. – A small and

Mies by Archizoom Associati, 1969.
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A small and different entrepreneur. Text by Paolo Deganello (Archizoom Associati).
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Sergio Cammilli had studied at the Porta Romana art institute in Florence. He had made the War Memorial of his anti-fascist Agliana, and for his Poltronova company he had designed the “Toscanella,” a modern-day version of the traditional Tuscan straw chair. We—[Archizoom Associatil], the newly graduated, radical designers, protestors of a productivist design culture—sought new merchandise, new types of products, and new images able to give shape to our protests. We also tried to bring art to politics. In 1966, our first encounter with Cammilli didn’t take place in a university or at the company, but rather in an art gallery, Pistoia’s Jolly 2, at a time when neither designers nor architects stepped foot in galleries. For that matter, not even industrialists visited art galleries in search of designs to manufacture. There, Cammilli saw the real-life Superonda prototype, made in plywood and laminated wood painted in green and orange stripes. Throughout the Superarchitettura exhibition he encountered a different, disenchanted, anti-academic, all-pop way of designing products. He called his Art Director, Sottsass, and immediately decided to manufacture it.
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Mies by Archizoom Associati, 1969. – A small and

Mies by Archizoom Associati, 1969.
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A small and different entrepreneur. Text by Paolo Deganello (Archizoom Associati).
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I remember a meeting with them (ccmmilli and Sottsass), in a room on the first floor at the new Poltronova headquarters. We all attended. Ettore and Cammilli were holding a 1:5-scale cardboard model with blue and white stripes. Straightaway, he offered to make the product with Pirelli foam: “They can send us the polyurethane foam pad. It’ll already be cut, so we’d only have to upholster it.” We chose the Sky covering, an inexpensive waterproof textile that Oldenburg had used in white on some of his sculptures. It was also present in primary colors—red, green, yellow, black, etc.—on the cheap trench jackets anti-conformist girls wore. They’d brag about the bold colors and the synthetic fabric. One day I was there for the first Safari prototype, which, by the way, Cammilli had made on the weekends, in fiberglass with a pharmacist friend of his. He led me to the warehouse and showed me about twenty pre-cut foam pads ready to be upholstered. It wasn’t a prototype anymore, and neither a one-off.
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Mies by Archizoom Associati, 1969. – A small and

Mies by Archizoom Associati, 1969.
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A small and different entrepreneur. Text by Paolo Deganello (Archizoom Associati).
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But thanks to Cammilli’s engineering, it became a possible series product. Cammilli liked that. It truly was an industrial product, with industrial-product costs, where craftsmanship was limited to simply cutting and sewing on the upholstery. But its form and type were absolutely new. A sofa/single bed that could be used as a couch and even a chaise lounge, covered in washable, light, all-synthetic, all-new plastic textile. A small revolution if compared to Quarrata sofas at the time. So was he indeed dreaming about building the FIAT of padding in Agliana? Maybe. Cammilli’s background was in art but he was from , Agliana, a small anti-fascist, left-wing town where culture for the politically involved was of priceless importance. I as well come from a small town, and I had a strong political upbringing. I had been part of student protest movements, and at that time I was also an activist in an extra-Parliamentary left-wing group called “Potere Operaio.”
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Mies by Archizoom Associati, 1969. – A small and

Mies by Archizoom Associati, 1969.
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A small and different entrepreneur. Text by Paolo Deganello (Archizoom Associati).
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But Cammilli and I never discussed politics. We were formal in our conversations, and we saw a lot of one another during the Superonda, Safari, and Mies prototype productions. Then there were also our long car rides in his white Alfa Romeo heading for the furniture fair in Milan. Both of us knew he was a communist and I was a left-wing extra-Parliamentary activist. It was very important for me to know that Cammilli was a “comrade,” and even though he was the “owner,” the relationship he had with the few employees of his easily made you understand that, for him, they were his collaborators and not his servants. And, for us small-town guys, culture was something positive, a value that could change the status quo and give a new and modern quality to furniture. Art wasn’t supposed to give just an aesthetic value, but also existentially legitimize that grand series the factory promised against all the behavioral and social backwardness of underpaid craftsmanship and cottage industry, which was still alive and kicking in Quarrata and across Italy’s production centers. So together our furniture sought a new kind of home, as affordable as possible to the not-so-well-off but educated.
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Cover of the number 486 of the magazine “Domus” from 1970.
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Ultrafragola and the “Mobili Grigi” series, in “Ultrafragola:ettoreSottsass jr., “The monographs of Poltronova”, 2020, text by @francescabalenaarista.
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The Ultrafragola mirror is the only piece in Ettore Sottsass’s Mobili Grigi series that was actually produced. All the others were made only in limited numbers. The words used by Sottsass to describe this series, with their «rounded and (permanently) swollen shapes of perhaps female or, if you like, religious origin (which is the same thing)», seem to reverberate, amplified, in its wavy frame lit up by pink neon.
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#designbreak #poltronova #superstudio #ettoresottsass #sottsass #ultrafragola #mobiligrigi #domusweb @domusweb

Durga Temple [aka Monkey Temple] in Varanasi, Indi

Mobili Grigi. Photo by Ettore Sottsass jr. and Alb

Mobili Grigi. Photo by Ettore Sottsass jr. and Alberto Fioravanti, 1970.
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Ultrafragola and the “Mobili Grigi” series, in “Ultrafragola:ettoreSottsass jr., “The monographs of Poltronova”, 2020, text by @francescabalenaarista.
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The third edition of Eurodomus, organised by “Domus” magazine and Torino Esposizioni, was held for the first time in Palazzo dell’Arte in Milan, after the two previous events in Genoa and Turin, and offered huge potential for international visibility. The reactions of the public and business insiders to Sottsass’s project were very strong. The position of “Abitare” magazine was emblematic of the general tone, criticising the Mobili Grigi series along the lines of “No, no, not this” and judging it to be in bad taste.
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