Zanotta (company)


Zanotta is an Italian furniture company particularly known for the iconic pieces of Italian design it produced in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. These include the "Sacco" bean bag chair and "Blow", the first mass-produced inflatable chair. The company was founded in 1954 and has its main plant in Nova Milanese. In 1983 Zanotta established its experimental division, Zabro, headed by Alessandro Mendini. Since the death of its founder, Aurelio Zanotta, in 1991, it has been run by members of his family. Zanotta's products were awarded the Compasso d'Oro in 1967, 1979, and 1987.

History

The company was founded in 1954 by the young entrepreneur Aurelio Zanotta with its manufacturing plant in Nova Milanese where it remains to the present day. Originally called Zanotta Poltrona, at first it specialised in fairly traditional upholstered furniture. However, by the early 1960s, the company had established a reputation for modern design and began commissioning avant-garde works by designers such as Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Gae Aulenti, Ettore Sottsass, and Alessandro Mendini.
In 1965 Zanotta was one of the first furniture companies to use expanded polyurethane foam and frameless construction in its designs, most notably the "Throw Away" series of sofas and armchairs designed by Willie Landels. One of Zanotta's most enduring successes was its 1968 "Sacco" bean bag chair, designed by Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini and Franco Teodoro. It was originally to have used polyurethane foam off-cuts for the filling but eventually settled on polystyrene beads. From the 1970s Zanotta achieved further success by re-issuing earlier designs which in their day had been considered too avant-garde for mass production. These included the "Larianna" tubular steel chair designed by Giuseppe Terragni in 1936 and the "Mezzadro" stool designed by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni in the late 1950s.
Zanotta established Zabro, its experimental division, in 1983 headed by Alessandro Mendini and Alessandro Guerriero. Amongst the pieces Zabro produced were Mendini's "Dorifora" chair in 1984 and the furniture series "Animali Domestici" designed by in 1986.. The company launched Zanotta Edizioni in 1989, "a special collection exploring the boundaries between art and design." The pieces were produced in limited editions and combined industrial manufacture with hand-painted decoration.
In 1989, Aurelio Zanotta and several of his designers including Achille Castiglioni, Gae Aulenti, Andrea Branzi, and Ettore Sottsass attended the International Design Conference in Aspen. The conference theme that year was The Italian Manifesto. In his talk at the conference Zanotta described the emergence of the mid-20-century revolution in Italian design and the early years of his own business:
Those were years of great vitality, there was an explosion of constructive energy, a profound desire to sweep away the past and create a new world. The phenomenon of Italian design grew out of this widely felt urge to renew everything.

After Aurelio Zanotta's death in 1991, the company remained in his family. Since 2002 it has been run by Zanotta's three children, Eleonora, Francesca, and Martino. The Italian furniture company Tecno purchased 80% of Zanotta's shares in 2017. However, the two companies maintain separate production, design and management structures.

Notable designs

Notable designs produced by Zanotta include: