Design
In 1957, in the second year of university, while the professor of Construction Sciences explains the principle of the ‘resistance through form’ of materials, Cesare Leonardi bends a sheet of paper and imagines a continuous element shaped to include a seat, armrests and a backrest at the same time. This simple intuition was at the origin of the Ribbon Chair (Nastro).However, a number of years went by before he and Franca Stagi managed to produce a prototype. His encounter with Alfonso Negri, a skilled Modenese craftsman, is decisive. “I like it,” he said, “let’s try and make it out of fibreglass.” After a long experimentation phase, in 1961 the Ribbon prototype saw the light.Despite not finding companies interested in producing it, the two architects did not give up, and in 1966 they designed new chais: a ‘rocking chair’ made entirely out of fibreglass, and a ‘shell-shaped’ chair (Guscio), called Eco, because when inside it, sounds appear to echo yet are greatly softened. These were the years of the economic boom, in which plastics, the focus of experiments by architects and designers, were slowly becoming more widely adopted.Dondolo, Ribbon and Eco were presented at the 8th Salone del Mobile in Milan in 1968 at the stand of the Bernini firm from Figline Valdarno (province of Florence), and proved an immediate success. “They were such a novelty,” Leonardi recalls, “that everyone just had to come along and take a look at them.” The products were featured in international newspapers and magazines; Leonardi met Joe Colombo and the leading designers of the day. The following year, the Bernini catalogue also featured the Zeta chair, the Mantissa sofa, the Fold coffee-table and the Quadrante table, which from round could become square. Shortly afterwards, production was moved to another company, Fiarm-Elco of Scorzè (province of Venice) and the repertory was enlarged to include new models: the Kappa, 3/4 and 3/4 Tris coffee-tables, the Cuneo and Lenticchia umbrella stands and the XYZ fruit bowl.The 1972 exhibition at the MoMA in New York, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, consecrated Italian industrial design to world fame. The Dondolo Rocking Chair symbolised the show: the synthesis and perfect expression of a new era and a new approach to design.