In the 1960s, in a region such as Tuscany which produced literally nothing in the field of design, Poltronova had all the best on its team: not just Ettore Sottsass, who was its art director, but Gae Aulenti, Paolo Portoghesi, Giovanni Michelucci, Angelo Mangiarotti, the Archizoom and Superstudio groups, De Pas-D’Urbino-Lomazzi; not just the mentors, but also the leading exponents of New Design who were then called radicals…
Furniture filters its own time, absorbing and retaining the ingredients, the dust of cosmic wind. A solar wind of intense emotions and considerations, from when we discovered that, having learned the lesson after being immersed in the milky pool of reason, it is possible, pleasurable, necessary, to bask in colors, emotions, and sensuality. And thus play and irony also emerge, watching oneself work gazing down from silent flight in a hot-air balloon…
The Centro Studi Poltronova was created in 2005 for two reasons: to archive important documents associated with the original Poltronova Company, and also to make some of its most iconic furniture and lighting pieces available in the marketplace…
Poltronova… words and thoughts.
Archizoom, the Florentine radical group... was not merely a cultural avant-garde or a watershed moment for design and architecture, it was a way of life set to the soundtrack of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
Poltronova was a workshop and a magical place. We'd bring them mounds of drawings, but very few became actual pieces of furniture and objects. But they were experiments just the same, ideas thrown into the future that, sooner or later, would become a reality.
Maybe what unites and joins all these materials is only the fresh inventive gesture, an alternative to the standard, the singularity and peculiarity of materials, the presence of color.
Poltronova is the radical factory. Poltronova constitutes a historic moment, which is still alive and where many of us still feel at home. Where the glorious and long story of Italian design began among the frogs and reeds, before reaching the altars of honor...