Gufram - Carrara armchair

In 2016 POLTRONA is therefore presented in a limited series of "real-faux" Carrara marble, this version of the seat is part of the special editions produced to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Gufram, established 1966. Gufram met Alessandro Mendini for the first time in 1974. The context is the magazine Casabella of which Mendini at the time was the director. On the November cover of that year, in a white interior and glossy parquet floor setting, there was a barefoot woman in a blue jumpsuit sitting in an austere and unwieldy tomb. It was block of fake granite, almost three metres high, designed by Mendini and produced on that occasion by Gufram. It was an enigmatic image, so curious as well as forbidding that only fourty years later did somebody in the company find the courage to ask the author about it.
And from here starts again a dialoque, which had been maybe willingly interrupted, between designer and company, between concept work and physical work, speaking of the past and the future, of what design is and what it must forcefully be even by pretending. And so Poltrona was born, designed by Mendini for Gufram in 2014. It is a project that is also a philosophy, made uo of unique contrasts between the lightness of polyurethane and the heavy weight simulated by the fake marble that looks even more real than the real one. Poltrona is a dichotomy between chasing automation at all costs and the fundamental virtue of the artisan, whose steadfast and expert hand actualizes the artistic action.

Alessandro Mendini

Alessandro Mendini; Milanese architect and designer, he mainly deals with neo-modern and contemporary design. His research focuses on the design of furniture, environments, architecture and installations. The characteristic of his projects has as a trait d'union an eccentric taste for the combination of contrasting elements by reworking apparently antithetical cues and ideas. In collaboration with Alessi, Philips, Swarovski and Swatch, he has designed iconic pieces that have enriched the world design scene. In addition to this, for the Cappellini catalog, Mendini created the Proust armchair and its variant with renewed upholstery, Proust Geometrica. In 1979 and 1981 he won the Compasso d'Oro for design, he also received the honor of the Architectural League of New York and the Laurea Honoris Causa at the Milan Polytechnic and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan, in France.

Gufram

Gufram is an Interior Design Italian brand globally known for pushing the limits of industrial design. With its Radical Design spirit and its nonconformist experimentation linked to aesthetic, technological and material research, Gufram has created seats and interior design icons that have entered collective imagination: playful, subversive and desecrating products with a POP soul, willingly designed as anti-design items. Gufram was born in Turin as an artisanal entity, where the craftsmen specialized in upholstery, cabinet making and furniture padding met the artistic and international avant-garde with the goal to give birth to a new way of understanding modern furniture. Since 1966 Gufram has been producing design icons that have become unique in form and value thanks to the cross-contamination between the industrial design approach, the artisanal creation and the imaginative flair typical of art. Gufram's unmistakable furniture items like the couch Bocca, the chaise lounge Pratone and the hall tree Cactus (just to name a few), also known as Domestic Sculptures able to interpret the contact point between both the artistic and the design worlds, are now displayed in the most beautiful houses and in the most renowned museums in the world.