Colourful and unconventional 60s with their miniskirts and changing customs. For the first time, and as the decade unfolds, Italy’s social and collective conduct, which sprang from the fast paced rhythm of factories and big cities, becomes vibrantly modern. As the initial naïve experimental phase of the Italian industry ends, the 60s kick off a new season where creativity and innovation go harmoniously hand in hand.
On this scene, design plays the role of striker, an advanced and avantgarde breakthrough. Though closely interrelated with industrial production, yet far from the rigorous rules of large scale production, design projects continue to enjoy almost absolute freedom.
In a market that is still free from marketing dictates, segregation of niches or imposed targets set by fashion trends, designers can still invent and experiment with forms and objects of the future, having equally optimistic entrepreneurs as accomplices in seeking future innovations.
As Milan affirm itself as the undisputed capital of design, it is within the home that design sets in to mould renewed models of lifestyle and behaviour. While kitchens cast their traditional image of hearth aside in favour of colourful modular solutions populated by appliances, living-rooms – where black and white images of television triumph - see design devote itself to creating new scenarios that suit a novel, freer and more informal lifestyle.
Objects are transformed to fit a space that is no longer stable, flexible object can be moved, surfaces are devised to lie on, chat, listen to music or watch television alone, in a couple or in group.
The BBB collections of those years embody such vibrant, optimistic, non conformist spirit: DePas, D’Urbino, Lomazzi and Decursu designed an armchair and a system of padded modules that can be arranged in an infinite number of ways, a soft volume that is almost pneumatic and can be articulated endless in the most diverse configurations: for unconventional relaxation, DePas D’Urbino and Lomazzi created a variable geometric seat that can become an armchair and chaise-longue at the same time. With subtle irony, Achille and PierGiacomo Castiglioni designed, for BBB, one of the most significant reinterpretations: inspired by a traditional folding chair model of the Thonet catalogue, the two brothers revived proportions and dimensions
to enhance comfort, and crafted an archetype of contemporary design, a benchmark that BBB currently
recovered and updated in its spirits and intentions, conferring to its original version a new translucent and colourful look to reiterate that a true classic never dawns.
Enrico Morteo