Osvaldo Borsani T58 Ebonized Wood Table Tecno Production, 1962

Sunny pedestal table with a structure in wood and a round-shaped tabletop in smoked glass, designed by Giovanni Offredi and manufactured by Saporiti during the 1970s. Giovanni Offredi was a prominent Italian furniture and product designer of the second half of the 20th century. As opposed to most of the other Italian furniture designers of his time, Giovanni Offredi was not an architect, nor did he start designing early in his professional career. Instead, Offredi partially fits the career path of some of the talented contemporary designers who pursue product design outside of formal education in architecture. The earliest furniture design work known by Giovanni Offredi consists of exemplary furnishings made specifically for some of wealthy families in Milan. Such is the case of the works done by Offredi for Casa C., in 1960, in Gorgonzola, a small town 14 miles from Milan. These works were designed with a surprisingly minimal simplicity and elegance, and they also clearly display a hallmark of his design work with the use of angular lines and exposed metal or wood frames—not unlike some of the modern Scandinavian designs of the time. In the late 1960s, Giovanni Offredi met Sergio Saporiti, the owner of an Italian design shop and furniture maker Saporiti, and in 1970, Offredi formalized a partnership with the furniture maker. This partnership would be long and successful and resulted in many furniture designs of distinct precision that were clearly modern and innovative and that went on to enjoy considerable commercial success. The most prominent furniture designs that Offredi made for Saporiti include the Paracarro table...

Extendable dining table in wood designed by Ilmari Tapiovaara in the 1970s. This rare table presents a rectangular top with elegant rounded edges. The table top fits to the base wi...

Square table model Tema with structure in black lacquered wood and diagonal inserts in natural spruce on top. Designed by Vico Magistretti and produced by B&B, 1973, Italy. Lict...

Extendable Chelsea dining table with a square tabletop and a pyramidal base entirely made in walnut wood and metal details. It was designed by Vittorio Introini and produced by S...

Round dining table or living room table with four legs in black lacquered metal, table top in wood and brass details. The peculiar tabletop presents a beautiful decoration due to t...

Round table model TL30 with black lacquered metal base and a wooden top. Designed by Franco Albini for Poggi, Pavia in 1950s.   After spending his childhood and part of his youth in Robbiate in Brianza, where he was born in 1905, Franco Albini moved with his family to Milan. Here he enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic and graduated in 1929. He starts his professional activity in the studio of Gio Ponti and Emilio Lancia, with whom he collaborates for three years. He probably had his first international contacts here In those three years, the works carried out are admittedly of a twentieth-century imprint. It was the meeting with Edoardo Persico that marked a clear turning point towards rationalism and the rapprochement with the group of editors of “Casabella”. The new phase that that meeting provoked starts with the opening of the first professional studio in via Panizza with Renato Camus and Giancarlo Palanti. The group of architects began to deal with public housing by participating in the competition for the Baracca neighborhood in San Siro in 1932 and then creating the Ifacp neighborhoods: Fabio Filzi (1936/38), Gabriele D’Annunzio and Ettore Ponti (1939). Also in those years Albini worked on his first villa Pestarini. But it is above all in the context of the exhibitions that the Milanese master experiments his compromise between that “rigor and poetic fantasy” coining the elements that will be a recurring theme in all the declinations of his work – architecture, interiors, design pieces . The opening in 1933 of the new headquarters of the Triennale in Milan, in the Palazzo dell’Arte, becomes an important opportunity to express the strong innovative character of rationalist thought, a gym in which to freely experiment with new materials and new solutions, but above all a “method”. Together with Giancarlo Palanti, Albini on the occasion of the V Triennale di Milano sets up the steel structure house, for which he also designs the ‘furniture. At the subsequent Triennale of 1936, marked by the untimely death of Persico, together with a group of young designers gathered by Pagano in the previous edition of 1933, Franco Albini takes care of the preparation of the exhibition of the house, in which the furniture of three types of accommodation. The staging of Stanza per un uomo, at that same Triennale, allows us to understand the acute and ironic approach that is part of Albini, as a man and as a designer: the theme addressed is that of the existenzminimum and the reference of the project is to the fascist myth of the athletic and sporty man, but it is also a way to reflect on low-cost housing, the reduction of surfaces to a minimum and respect for the way of living. In that same year Albini and Romano designed the Ancient Italian Goldsmith’s Exhibition: vertical uprights, simple linear rods, design the space. A theme, that of the “flagpole”, which seems to be the center of the evolution of his production and creative process. The concept is reworked over time, with the technique of decomposition and recomposition typical of Albinian planning: in the setting up of the Scipio Exhibition and of contemporary drawings (1941) the tapered flagpoles, on which the paintings and display cases are hung, are supported by a grid of steel cables; in the Vanzetti stand (1942) they take on the V shape; in the Olivetti store in Paris (1956) the uprights in polished mahogany support the shelves for displaying typewriters and calculators. The reflection on this theme arises from the desire to interpret the architectural space, to read it through the use of a grid, to introduce the third dimension, the vertical one, while maintaining a sense of lightness and transparency. The flagpole is found, however, also in areas other than the exhibition ones. In the apartments he designed, it is used as a pivot on which the paintings can be suspended and rotated to allow different points of view, but at the same time as an element capable of dividing spaces. The Veliero bookcase...

Osvaldo Borsani and Eugenio Gerli for Tecno, dining or conference table, model T102, teak, enameled steel, Italy, 1964.  The designers Borsani and Gerli created an outstanding piece...

Beautiful high end table produced in the 1970s/1980s attributed to Osvaldo Borsani. The top is easily interchangeable with another top in the event a marble top is desirable. This or...

A classic of Italian design from the 1960s. Round table model T69 with wood top, rare, production Tecno designers Osvaldo Borsani & Eugenio Gerli. The particularity of T69 is the str...

A beautiful dining table, model “T210”, designed by Osvaldo Borsani and manufactured by Tecno Milano in Italy around 1950. This eye-catching table rests on black cast iron legs an...

Osvaldo Borsani and Eugenio Gerli for Tecno, dining table, model T69, wood, enameled steel, Italy, 1964 The designers Borsani and Gerli created together an outstanding piece of fur...

Centro Progetti Tecno, conference table model 'T335', lacquered wood, aluminum, Italy, 1975-1978 Large conference table with a black lacquered wooden top that has an incredibly soft...