First part: the mindset
“Carlo’s house was a gray building, facing a garden that too looked like stone.” Pasolini describes the house of Petrolio’s main character at the beginning of the great epic novel of the Italian writer. The grey houses, and their owners, of the Italian economic boom ideology will, at that time, be the target of Italian radical movements and even design will soon became radical.
Cassina was at the vanguard of the Radical Design movements, which still makes a lot of talk today.
In that same year, the fourteenth Triennale opened with the theme of Il Grande Numero (The Greater Number), chosen by the organisers as a response to ‘the problems of a society of mass work and mass consumption’. Did they want to dismantle the grey houses?
‘The high level of critical consciousness’ of Italian architects, write Ambasz, MoMa’s design curator in 1970, describing the powerful cultural movement the Italian industrial system was making it possible.
At the beginning of the 70s, Cesare Cassina imagined a different industrial operation, which could open up a new way of creating and designing objects. In which the design goal is not mere mass production but a more elevated one—the transmission of a value.
Cesare put Gaetano Pesce, at the time a young avant-garde designer just out of the N Group experience, at the head of this new company. BracciodiFerro (arm wrestle)
They set up a workshop in Genoa, a city far removed from Cassina’s Meda factory’s market-orientated concerns and industrial troubles, experiencing union problems and strikes like many of his contemporaries. Aldo Cichero, who had many contacts in the city’s shipyards, was chosen by Cassina to be in charge of production.
Pesce invited Alessandro Mendini and the Cuban architect Riccardo Porro to participate in the project.
Times were hot. Like the rest of Europe, Italy did not chill 68s protests yet. Entrepreneurship was in turmoil.
BracciodiFerro wants to cut with the past. Not just another company but a manifesto to declare the end of the industrial production system as it was until then, meanwhile inaugurating the beginning of a new way of conceiving projects and designs.
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A company should always aspiring to be part of the social and cultural dialogues, and give an active contribution to improve that very conversation.
Living inside a bubble is not suitable for anybody.
Marketing and management spreadsheets are fundamental within a company. But the real soul, the true core, is this constructive and engaging dialogue between the company and the people.
To make sense and be beneficial, you have to add something to the dialogue. To improve the people and be sure they are happy to be part of this dialogue, you need to make an emphatic effort and not only watch them as numbers on a sales chart.
Cassina tries to achieve this community empowerment by engaging them with its potential: chairs, lamps, sofas, etc., as simple as that.
Furniture companies have a significant advantage from this point of view and perhaps also a great responsibility.
They come in touch with their customers in a very intimate environment, where the smallest community that the human being knows takes place: the family.
In our home, we use objects of every kind, and they shape us in different ways. If a company wants to be relevant, it has to engage with us in our home with the most intelligent and highly cultural devices that can create.
Despite having enormous power, having a consolidated network and a production chain that now works amazingly, Many companies are unable to impact, not only on a global dimension but even on a local level. They struggle to be relevant.
Why? Because there is no desire to participate in this dialogue, there is no pleasure in participating in the conversation. Perhaps due to the fear of saying something wrong or cultural shyness.
But if one keeps saying nothing, in the end, it vanishes.
Next time we’ll talk about in detail about the BracciodiFerro collection. Three years of innovations.
