This story begins in the Tuscan countryside, a place where one does not arrive by chance, but through determination, following the road that winds between fields and villages.
It is born of enthusiasm, from fortunate meetings between extraordinary people.
Founded in 1957, the company soon acquired an avant-garde image, thanks to the direction of Ettore Sottsass, an incredibly original designer, architect, ceramist and intellectual, who over a twenty-year span would put his name to over 50 projects for Poltronova.
Sottsass brought to the field of interior decoration the use of color and an alphabet of new materials and new insights, as in the Superbox project: wardrobes with large bases, covered in striped plastic laminate like road signs or gasoline pumps.
Sottsass’s creativity would soon meet with that of the new radical groups, Archizoom and Superstudio, which in 1966 held the “Superarchitettura” show/manifesto of Italian Radical Design in Pistoia.
The prototypes in wood and cardboard shown there led to the birth of the Superonda sofa by the Archizoom group, which opened the road to new ways of creating and using the home environment, and the Passiflora and Gherpe lamps by Superstudio, pop designs in colored plastic.
Riding the wave of the visionary creativity of the Sixties, Poltronova provided the setting for memorable events at its out-of-the-way location among hills and vineyards, such as the reading by Allen Ginsberg, which drew crowds of young people who flocked there to see one of the heroes of the Beat Generation reciting his poems…
It was this climate of great intellectual vivacity that gave birth to the Mies chair, the Safari sofa and the Sanremo lamp by Archizoom Associati, the Sofo sofa and the Luxor series by Superstudio, the Mobili Grigi (Grey Furniture collection) by Ettore Sottsass.
Others who worked with Poltronova were Gae Aulenti, Giovanni Michelucci,Angelo Mangiarotti, Elena e Massimo Vignelli, Paolo Portoghesi: all designers who represented different project trends. There were artists, too: Max Ernst, Mario Ceroli, Gino Marotta, Ugo Nespolo and Gianni Ruffi.
Putting them together, in a single catalog, was the company’s innovation and strength: at a time when design was still interpreted as a unitary culture, the Poltronova catalog was instead made up of individual products, with strong personalities, each with its own story to tell.
In 1972, when Emilio Ambasz organized “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape”, the big show on Italian design at the MOMA Museum of Modern Art in New York, Poltronova participated with a selection of 11 articles in its production, presenting itself as phenomenon making a large impact and winning due recognition on the international scene.
Poltronova is a Tuscan company: starting from a great craft tradition and upholding this as a strong point, it took shape as a place for researching and experimenting with new forms, new materials, new styles.
Today the company’s catalog includes timeless objects, icons of Italian design in the world, such as the giant glove Joe: ironic, bewildering and superscaled, designed by De Pas, D’Urbino e Lomazzi in 1971 using innovative materials and technologies.
Thanks to its preeminence in experimental production and to the guarantee of the names that have worked and are now working there, Poltronova is a benchmark for those who approach the phenomenon of Italian design with curiosity and interest.
By 2002 the company’s new owners have been working with the protagonists of this history, in order to continue to represent, together, the contemporary world.
2005 saw the creation of the Centro Studi Poltronova, a research and documentation center: the company history and know-how are the starting point for the formulating of new scenarios.
The Centro Studi Poltronova carries out cultural and educational activities, actively working with schools, universities, authorities and institutions in order to transmit the experimental approach to design that characterizes Poltronova’s production. An essential part of the Centro Studi is the Poltronova Historical Archives, which holds drawings, photographs, catalogs and projects going from when the company was founded up to today. Thus Poltronova, directed toward the production of furnishings from its historic collection, is supported by the Centro Studi for the editions of projects from its archives commissioned by Italian and foreign design museums. Among the projects organized by the Centro Studi Poltronova are: in 2005, the five “Superboxes,” prototypes designed by Ettore Sottsass in 1966 and produced in 2005 by the Centro Studi in close collaboration with the architect; in 2007, the reconstruction at the Carla Sozzani gallery in Milan of the “Superarchitettura” show, held in 1966 in Pistoia by the radical Archizoom and Superstudio groups, a “seminal moment” of the new Italian design; also in 2007, the reconstruction for the show on Ettore Sottsass “Non Capisco Perché” (“I Don’t Understand Why”), (Trieste, December 2007-March 2008) of three pieces of furniture designed by the architect in 1965 and built at the time in a single specimen each, and the making of a documentary on Ettore Sottsass’s relationship with Poltronova, with exclusive interviews and documents from the archives.
