10 seats that have made the history of Italian design Make yourself comfortable

The great season of Italian furniture design could begin after the Second World War, when the Triennale di Milano organized the now famous RIMA exhibition in which pioneers of industrial design such as Ignazio Gardella, Carlo De Carli, Vico Magistretti and Gabriele Mucchi introduced for the first time to the general public the idea of a furniture reproducible in series, rationalistic in its use of spaces and finally far from the heavy nineteenth-century furniture. A season that saw a continuous growth over the next twenty years and that culminated in the late 50s and early 70s with the production of furnishings that have remained iconic even today. One of the most important categories of Italian industrial design were the seats, which over the years evolved from the ultra-modern reinterpretations of the classic wooden chair such as the legendary Superleggera by Gio Ponti, to the more elaborate and conceptual models that Ettore Sottsass signed in the late 80s.

To better explore this immense world and its protagonists, here is a list of the 10 seats that have made the history of Italian design.

1. Gio Ponti – Superleggera (1957)

If the great part of the most famous seats of Italian design was born with mass industrial production in mind, this chair by Ettore Sottsass starts from the opposite side: the Met Museum itself in describing the seat in its caption begins by writing that «the honesty with which Sottsass designed and marketed this work to a luxury clientele could be seen as antithetical to modernism’s democratic ethos predicated on mass production». Unlike the works produced in the Memphis Group season, this chair does not have ringing colors, but retains that attention to elementary geometric shapes that has always distinguished Sottsass's work.