You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
richard buckminster fuller
The Long Life of Design in Italy B&B Italia 50 Years and Beyond Stefano Casciani
With texts by Ferruccio de Bortoli Renzo Piano Deyan Sudjic
FOREWORD
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Massimiliano, Giorgio and Piero Ambrogio Busnelli
Giorgio Busnelli
B&B Italia 50 Years and Beyond the long life of design in italy
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B&B Italia is a family business created by my wonderful father Piero Ambrogio, and carried forward by me, together with my brothers Giancarlo and Emanuele, and by my son Massimiliano. But it is also, above all, a business as my father had imagined it, through which have passed and continue to pass the leading names in international design and architecture, to realise with us their ideas and their dreams. After many years, the moment has come to reflect on what the experience of working in this company was, is and can be all about, day in, day out: inventing strategies and products, conducting research and engaging in communication forever geared towards a customer base that holds the company in high esteem and requests that it stay true to its role as an innovator in the world of interior design. We decided to put this “stocktaking� in the form of a book, a long story told through words and pictures. Readers can thus construct their own, personal vision of B&B Italia, bearing witness to the richness and variety of images, people and experiences recounted here, to judge for themselves the extent to which we have remained loyal to our vocation as an industrial design business. In its own way, this book, too, is a B&B Italia project – complex and well-structured, with input from many people both inside and outside the company, starting with the author Stefano Casciani, who has tried to interpret and encapsulate through our story the values of the industrial culture that underpins Italian design and constitutes the reason for its great success around the world. I would like, then, to mention and thank all the B&B Italia employees and external collaborators who have contributed to creating the identity of the company that is B&B Italia. They have my gratitude. A special vote of thanks goes to Rolando Gorla for his extraordinary support over many years of working on design and research: a guide full of wisdom and expertise who is transferring his wealth of knowledge to my son, Massimiliano. Last but by no means least, to my wife and children I offer this book as a token of my profound gratitude for their unwavering, faithful support over all these years.
Stefano Casciani
rule and chaos
Rule and Chaos Whichever book you open, you will find precisely the passage you need.
Professional writers can find themselves returning time
Walter Friedlaender (1873–1966)
change your life forever. As fate would have it, and luckily
and again to the same subject matter, especially if the matter in question is one of those that can move you and for Italy, when I was young, design – and in particular, industrial design – was assuming ever-greater cultural importance. Moreover, also growing was the number of
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
people, not restricted to those in the industry, who were keen to find out what lay behind the chic glamour of the modern styling of the home. And so I found myself, about thirty years ago, writing and publishing one of the first books on the history of a furniture industry, called Furniture as Architecture,+ and I was fortunate enough to be able to use this case study to compile a short history of the design of modern furniture. And yet Mario Mastropietro had got there well before me, offering – in Un’industria per il design+ – a fascinating inventory of projects, essays, documents and images all about, funnily enough, B&B Italia. Thus my pride in the primogeniture of that youthful work, dented by the fact that Pierino Busnelli’s company had beaten me to it, was consoled by the knowledge that I was in good company in attempting to go beyond the pompous rhetoric on design and the pretention of the academic critics, preferring instead to use language that was immediate, intense, targeted. In short, popularising the subject – an approach taken only very rarely in Italian literature on design. And since tout se tient, especially when we’re talking about language and writing, many years later fate would again have it that – having left the helm of Domus after a decade and thanks to a design magazine I had founded with Paola Bellani, disegno. la nuova cultura industriale – the opportunity came along, before exploring B&B Italia in depth and going on to write a whole book about it, to discover that within the business in question there was a healthy lack of rhetoric, particularly from the time when Giorgio Busnelli was handed the reins, consolidating the successful foundations laid by his father Piero Ambrogio, with a laser-like focus on the implementation of an integrated project strategy. Certainly, the case study of B&B Italia offered here is one of the most interesting that there have been in Italy and, indeed, further afield. “Interesting” because of its origins, which were down to the hard-headed tenacity of a young entrepreneur; because of the industrial quality of its products, connoting a level of quality higher than that of artisanal or small-scale products; because of its decision to rip up the rulebook and pay no heed to convention; because of its commitment to finding new techniques
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and production tools, invented from scratch; and because of its obsession with the idea that what goes on in a true industrial concern has nothing to do with throwaway culture, and so looking after the project materials and documents is as important a task as generating them in the first place. It was almost as if they wanted to ensure that the person who was destined to conceive and write this book would have access to an enormous quantity of information, images and documents – much of it never seen, and all of it utterly captivating. Even the form chosen for the book is not run-of-the-
+ S. Casciani, Furniture as Architecture. Design and Zanotta Products. Milan: Arcadia, 1984. + M. Mastropietro (ed.), Un’industria per il design. La ricerca, i designers, l’immagine B&B Italia. Milan: Lybra Immagine, 1982.
perhaps even a source of entertainment for the many design enthusiasts, both professional and amateur, who exist today.
B&B Italia 50 Years and Beyond
mill, since it looks like a user manual, a working tool for designers and scholars, and
The four main chapters that constitute this book are, in fact, four case studies their own design business. The perspectives of two photographers, Iwan Baan and Francesca Ferrari, who are still young, but have already garnered enviable reputations, complement the various pieces pinpointing some of the places that have been and/ or still are very important for the company, starting with the CR&S (Centro Ricerche & Sviluppo/Research & Development Centre) B&B Italia run by Rolando Gorla. The (direct and indirect) stories of B&B Italia’s leading players accompany this journey, which is full of unexpected twists and turns. Curiously, on at least two occasions, the great novelist Italo Calvino pops up
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for use by those who want to understand and – why not? – to set up in this day and age
in this book. He is invoked by Ferruccio de Bortoli, who compares Pierino Busnelli to a highly original Mr Palomar, an individual with an ability like nobody else to grasp and describe the world as it is – or could be – beyond deceptive appearances. The writer then reappears in one of the first literary discourses on the mysterious world of manufacturing, through the poetic language of Raymond Queneau in Le Chant du Styrène (The Song of Styrene), which was translated into Italian by Calvino. A simple coincidence or the farsightedness of poets who can see into the future? All told, this book is far from a Don Giovanni-esque catalogue for “madamine”, nor is it a collection of bestsellers, nor even an Olympic display case for the medals racked up by B&B Italia. On the contrary, it is an investigation into how those many successes were achieved, into the thinking of those who contributed to them and into what there is to be learned from them. It is a volume that does not claim to be exhaustive – something that would, in any case, be impossible in book form – but selects, chooses and includes that which is essential for understanding and communicating. It was all about constructing an object that would itself stand out in the field of corporate communications, that would cock a snook at clichéd, boring corporate monographs, and that would focus on graphic, photographic and typographic innovation. The work has now been completed, with some odd bridge burned and some ambiguity resolved in the process. Other questions remain open. There is no doubt that across these pages there flows a river of positive thoughts, and a ceaseless desire to travel along new, different routes. In a world that with every passing day, thanks to the science and technology so beloved by Calvino and Busnelli, is discovering more adoxically the orbits of electrons or solar systems become real only when observed, it remains the duty of the writer to describe past and present interactions and to trigger other (real, or maybe just potential) interactions. It is a difficult task, perhaps a thankless one in these times of superficiality, but one that I would like to continue to face, if the reader – as the aphorism of the great art critic Friedlaender puts it – on opening this book at random, can always find what he or she is looking for.
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about its quantum nature, where there is no existence without interaction, where par-
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Piero Ambrogio Busnelli and Cesare Cassina leaving on an airplane for New York, late 1960s
CHAPT — 1 once upon a time in italy and even now
chapter
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Once Upon a Time in Italy (and even now)
The Life of Things on the Planet — An Idea: To Create An Industry The Factory and the Architect — Design, Research and Development The Revolution around the Corner — Art and/or Design? B&B Italia: Birth of a New Industry — Maxalto, the Taste of Modernity New Italian Design — Great Floating Homes — The Life of Design in the Time of Crisis — The Future, There and Back
CHAPT — 1
once upon a time in italy and even now
1968 Whole Earth Catalog
The Whole Earth Catalog, conceived by Stewart Brand, was an attempt to categorize the fundamental tools and products for “radical” survival. On this page: the first issue from 1968
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with a NASA image of the Earth seen from the Moon
Commentaire pour un court métrage d’Alain Resnais – 1957
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LE BAMBOLE The bare-breasted portraits of the beautiful and extraordinary model Donna Jordan – whom Oliviero Toscani met in New York in the entourage of Andy Warhol’s Factory, engaged in a performance with some elements from the series Le Bambole – are scandalous for the bigoted Italy of the age. The organizers of Milan’s furniture fair, where the series was presented in 1972, oblige Busnelli to censure any enlargements and posters that reproduce the image in large-scale. But the selfrighteousness of the fair’s organizers
CHAPT — 1
creates even more of a stir, media craze and the product’s great success: a very precise idea by Mario Bellini on how to renew the padded structure (based on four angular elements in polyurethane that act as an elastic frame to which is then added the actual padded foam), but also an ode to the softness and comfort – especially psychological –
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such a radical product can offer.
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1 Piero Ambrogio Busnelli showing the features of Le Bambole Series to Manlio Armellini, Salone del Mobile, Milan, 1972 2 Le Bambole sofa inner structure, moulding department, B&B Italia factory, Novedrate (CO), 1973
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Observing through the telescope of history the Italy of fifty years ago, and with it the people who lived, designed and produced in that period, certainly has one advantage: it is easier to get a handle on the significance of the exploits of “pop” design in terms of its closeness to art. The pieces that Gaetano Pesce developed for C&B with the Research Centre have something different about them, which distinguishes them from other (equally successful) pieces, such as, for example, the Sacco armchair designed by Gatti, Paolini and Teodoro for Zanotta. Pesce’s pieces
B&B Italia 50 Years and Beyond
Art and/or Design?
were not just an act of courage on the part of the designer and his manufacturers, defying the conventions of what furniture – modern, modernist or whatever – could be, and then inventof the avant-garde, anticipating a link between art and design that would be re-forged only from the mid-1980s onwards and that continues today, with varying levels of success. And so it was fortuitous alchemy that, in 1969, led him to create with the UP Series (of which pieces 5 and 6, the Lady and Big Mama, with its pouf/ball footrest, became the most famous icons) not only some pieces of furniture, but a small personal gallery of sculptural objects. Their appearance aroused the enthusiasm of Cassina and Busnelli, as well as the amazement and curiosity – perhaps even scepticism – of sellers and users. But above all,
the long life of design in italy
ing together new languages. Even many years later, those experiments remain an expression
they shook up the static concept of the “armchair”, which became an object that could be expanded from a lightweight dimension to a far more substantial one. It was precisely this different quality, perhaps unique in the great effervescence of Italian pop design, that caught the eye of the young curator of the MoMA, Emilio Ambasz, who added the two elements of the UP Series to the 1972 exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape and also asked Pesce to put together a personal backdrop for the occasion: this, too, was created through the interaction of the Cassina Research Centre and C&B itself. For Ambasz, Pesce was one of those few “designers, the cultural premises predominant today have no validity and can therefore provide only a false basis for any formal inquiry. Devoid of any firm referents, they return, in a somewhat self-deprecatory attempt at purification, to the human figure as the source of all formal truth”. A clear reference is made here to the choice of representing, in an object/sculpture like UP, the female figure (which in the early versions of the product was even more evident) and to express in that way what Ambasz himself defined as the uneasiness of the “crusading” designer, meaning a designer who was aware of the contradiction between his commitment to improving the social conditions and the inevitable impulse towards consumerism that any new product generates, as an object of research and profound reflection. For Pesce, as a “feminist” ante litteram, the only option was, then, to attempt to unite his message promoting women’s liberation (“Up” is also an exhortation to rise up, to uprising, as well as being a description of the way the piece works) with the performance of polyurethane, which expands on contact with air, held back only by the elastic fabric covering of the armchair. Such a well-balanced synthesis between the gravitas of the thinking that lies behind the object and the lightness of the final result is very difficult to achieve, and this makes the UP project all the more important and timeless. Pesce’s personal installation at the exhibition (Scoperta di una piccola città sotterranea) with the support, both technical and financial, of Cassina and Busnelli, did not have the same lightness and was marked by a darker, more dramatic image, emphasised by Zaugg’s photography.
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1–3 Klaus Zaugg, photos of a famous ad campaign for the launch of the UP Series by Gaetano Pesce, C&B Italia, 1969
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1 Gaetano Pesce, Il periodo delle grandi contaminazioni: unità abitativa per due persone, installation for the exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, MoMA, New York, 1972 2 Sequence of the UP5 armchair expansion phases; it takes shape after removing the PVC wrapping and coming into contact with the air
In the meantime, however, C&B – a company that had been in existence for a mere six years – found itself in the eye of the media hurricane that grew around the Ambasz exhibition, consecrated in the world’s leading contemporary art museum as a research-based company, a leader in experimenting with new languages and in the invention of radically innovative products. As is only natural, of course, every consecration is followed by crisis
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– the exhibition at the MoMA in New York represented (and would go down in history as) the moment of the decisive shift from the epic of “beautiful Italian design” to its first great crisis of ideals, and C&B’s success was one of the signs that convinced Pierino Busnelli that he was on the right path. The course of things – some would call it fate – was such that C&B was destined to transform itself into another company, at last all of his own.
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B&B Italia 50 Years and Beyond
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The Life of Design in the Time of Crisis
At the turn of the millennium, some were afraid that the world was coming to an end. Apocalyptic fears quelled, what actually did come to pass was the end of the world as it had been imagined for many years. As the popular saying has it: “Even the future’s not what it used to be”. In the field of industrial production, and its sub-sector of furniture manufacture, the utopias of social design, the economical product that was “right” for everyone and the substantially positivist ideology of modern design were replaced – under media pressure, and perhaps also political pressure, above all in Italy – with the simpler, cross-class concept of lifestyle. This was in great part a psychological suggestion that made the majority of consumers aspire to purchase products that the media would continue to impose upon them, promising them all the while an “exclusive” social status. But this, in turn, required a constant alternation of fashions, to the point of true physical and cultural saturation, of homes, wardrobe, fridges, garages . . . Faced with this unexpected resurgence of consumerism, the Italian design industry did not always react promptly. It was no longer sufficient
CHAPT — 1
for the industry to avail itself of an ultra-flexible manufacturing infrastructure. Those who defined directions, strategies and product development – i.e. those concerned with design management, to use the reductivist neologism – came to play a more central role. Certainly, marketing on its own was not enough to anticipate the directions that would be taken by a public of such “capricious” consumers, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called the typical representative of liquid society. New entrepreneurs and talent scouts became thin on the ground, even in Italy. The lifespan of products was getting shorter and shorter. Designers themselves – especially those who had achieved fame and fortune not through experience as designers of spaces, but by being connoisseurs of form – found themselves in the contradictory position of wanting to be innovators while having to stick to their recognisable style, as demanded by the beleaguered market and manufacturers. The companies that rejected these perverse mechanisms, seeking out a path to resist the lifestyle epidemic, could only do so by leveraging their “genetic heritage” – if they had one, that is. For B&B Italia (which was increasingly run by the brothers Giorgio, Giancarlo and Emanuele, with their father now in the background, having been afflicted by an illness that slowly debilitated him), the focus was on maintaining the course of the technological refinement of products, conceived as a system of autonomous elements, created by designers who drew their inspiration from various sources but who, taken together, constituted a mini encyclopaedia of contemporary interior design, coherent and unitary albeit using diverse terminologies. In the interaction with the product designers, the role of the CR&S B&B Italia, run by Rolando Gorla, remained crucial. Since 2002, it had been based in a new, iconic building by Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel – a natural progression of Renzo Piano’s HQ, serving as a physical and functional link with Afra and Tobia Scarpa’s factory – named after the founder, Piero Ambrogio Busnelli. B&B Italia did not find itself unprepared for the financial crisis that shook the global
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economy from 2007 onwards, but the global crash was not one of the many (recurring and partially predictable) crises undergone by the capitalist system in the 200 years of its history. Spawned out of the blue by an explosive combination of ultra-fast globalisation, financial speculation and wrong-headed governance by large financial groups, it was the worst worldwide downturn since the Wall Street Crash of 1929, leaving in its wake many victims – not just banks such as Lehman Brothers, but also design companies; first and foremost
1 James Irvine, Radar armchair, B&B Italia, 2001 2 Uwe Fischer, Sina armchair, B&B Italia Project, 1999
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Powers of Ten
Charles and Ray Eames, still from the film Powers of Ten , 1977: the Earth
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seen from a distance of 10,000 km
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Objets d’affection
Afra and Tobia Scarpa — Antonio Citterio (Citterio and Nava) Gaetano Pesce — Mario Bellini — Kazuhide Takahama — Richard Sapper Paolo Piva — Studio Kairos — Gianfranco Ferré and Paolo Nava — CR&S B&B Italia James Irvine, Marc Newson — Jeffrey Bernett — Patricia Urquiola Naoto Fukasawa — Zaha Hadid — Barber & Osgerby — Atelier Oï
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CHAPT — 2
objets d ’ affection
How People View Things
Billions of words have been written on the essence of artificial objects, of designed things. Indeed, many words have been written and then printed in this book, in this chapter, in which we describe the genesis of numerous B&B Italia products from 1966 to the present. But one of the most basic questions often remains unanswered, or at best, attempts are made to answer it ambiguously: Are objects (i.e. things) really so different from subjects (i.e. people)? We human beings, who dominate the planet, look down on the things with which we interact, as if they really did have a status radically different from ours, but can we truly consider ourselves entirely separate from them? Objectivity can also mean unbiased judgement, the cold exercise of reason, applied to the examination of something that, it seems, is not subject to the myriad problems and contradictions that plague real people. What is worth consideration is a different way for people to look at things, designs and the objects that derive from them – i.e. the gaze that you can see in a researcher, a designer, a prototype engineer, a construction worker, a manufacturer and, naturally, in the end, also in those who possess the object and make use of it, consume it, taking care to keep it as intact as possible, perhaps for the benefit of those who will come after and may want to use it themselves. They are all gazes of affection, rather like the way one looks at a beloved child – but one with whom not everything has gone or is going so well, for whom one would like perhaps a different destiny, an unreachable perfection, a greater “resilience” to the difficulties of the world. Other gazes of affection include those of Richard Sapper on touching his Genia bookshelf, Pierino
B&B Italia 50 Years and Beyond the long life of design in italy
Busnelli showing his customers the quality of the materials and solutions he has found for his products, Naoto Fukasawa going round and round a model to mark the perfect profile of a Grande Papilio, that of a young Swiss designer trying to solve a puzzle of leather leaves to turn them into a different seat, one that is better than the others . . . Towards certain objects, the objects shown on these pages, we can feel the same sort of affection that we feel towards our fellow creatures – and not out of a fetishism for status symbols or as a replacement for other, more important feelings that are lacking. Barbara Kruger’s sarcastic but brilliant aphorism “I shop, therefore I am”, does not work here. Behind the story of each of these products there lie encounters, coincidences, infatuations, sacrifices, investments, persistence, trial and error. In short, life itself, which can animate not only human beings, but also the things that they generate and that attract the no longer distracted, no longer detached, no longer objective gaze of the inventor, of the manufacturer, of the user. The gaze of people with the ability to look empathically even at that which is other than themselves.
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From left: Piero Ambrogio Busnelli, Paolo Piva, Giorgio Busnelli, Rolando Gorla, Federico Busnelli at the design presentation for “Le Arti Industriali” programme (first and third from the left are collaborators from invited studios), CR&S B&B Italia, 1979
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objets d ’ affection
1 Coronado armchair disassembled to show its elements, assembled with a simple Allen key 2–4 Automatized work phases to make the Coronado components, C&B Italia factory, 1968
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1 Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Erasmo modular sofa, 1973: the assembly of elements (single without armrests, left and right ends, angular pouf and armchair with headrest) allows for many variations 2 Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Bonanza armchair, 1970: made up of a shell in polyurethane foam and upholstered by a single “draped” cloth over the frame
3 Erasmo armchair upholstered in fabric 4 Erasmo armchair seen from behind with raised headrest 5 Picture from a photo shoot for the magazine Domus 6 Afra and Tobia Scarpa, armchair and sofas from the Lauriana series, 1976 7 Cross-section of the Bonanza armchair frame, with foam-injected
polyurethane on the metal structure and Dacron covering 8–9 CR&S B&B Italia/Afra and Tobia Scarpa, cross-section drawing and sketch of the Bonanza armchair, with suggestions for cushion materials and coverings 10 Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Dape office system, 1980: along the long central spine of the tabletop, individual desktops are inserted
11 Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Piediferro table series, 1979; wrought iron base with tops in marble or other materials
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1–4 Antonio Citterio/CR&S, study sketches and drawings for Mart armchair frame and shell, 2003 5–6 Mart armchair, fine-tuning frame and leather upholstery, CR&S, 2003
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1, 3 Antonio Citterio, Backstage wardrobe system, 2013; composition (1) and study sketch (3) 2 Antonio Citterio, Michel modular sofa, 2012 4 Antonio Citterio, Acanto armchair, Maxalto, 2010 5 Antonio Citterio, different versions of the Lithos low table, Maxalto, 2010 6 Antonio Citterio, Mida series, Maxalto, 2010: different kinds of storage units can rest upon the same steel base
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