Cassina

Italy

Corporation

Produzent

Cesare and Umberto Cassina came from a family with a cabinetmaking tradition extending back at least to the eighteenth century. In 1927, the brothers founded their company, Cassina Amadeo, in Meda, north of Milan in Italy. At first they produced chairs and tables, and then increasingly finely crafted upholstered seating furniture in a historicist style. In the early 1930s, orders from the major stores La Rinascente and Mobilificio di Fogliano led to the expansion of the workshops, a transition to machine production, and the first designs that no longer took their cues from the past. In 1935, the company was renamed Figli di Amadeo Cassina. After the war, the move towards mass production continued with major contracts for furnishing Italian passenger ships. And it was also through ship outfitting that the collaboration with Gio Ponti, the firm’s first artistic advisor, came about. Ponti delivered designs for the first-class salon of the luxury liner *Andrea Doria*, which were then executed by Cassina. Together with Ponti, Cassina subsequently developed various chairs, including the Superleggera, which brought international recognition to the firm. In the 1950s, Franco Albini and Ico Parisi were among Cassina’s designers; in the 1960s, Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Vico Magistretti, and Mario Bellini joined the team. The 1970s saw daring designs like the concept car Kar-a-sutra by Mario Bellini. With the AEO lounge chair by Paolo Deganello, the I Feltri lounge chair by Gaetano Pesce, and chair objects by Alessandro Mendini, Cassina supported the quest for new approaches outside the mainstream. Starting in 1964, in addition to producing modern furniture designs and participating in start-ups like C&B Italia, Cassina became one of the first furniture companies to reissue modern furniture classics. Since that time, designs by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand have been reissued in the product line I Maestri. With additional models by Erik Gunnar Asplund, Gerrit Rietveld, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, and others, this historical collection is constantly expanding. Recent designers for Cassina include Konstantin Grcic, Patrick Norguet, Zaha Hadid, and Philippe Starck. While manufacturing home furnishings, Cassina continues to develop and deliver complete interiors for shops, restaurants, and hotels. In 1989, Cassina became part of the Steelcase Group and later was sold to the Fimalac Group. In 2005, Cassina became a member of the Poltrona Frau Group, which was acquired in 2014 by the American Haworth Group.