The furniture that most people associate with Italian mid-century design — the Superleggera, the Carimate chair, the 686 Metropolita sofa — did not emerge from individual workshops. It was manufactured in a concentrated industrial district in the province of Monza and Brianza, north of Milan, where cabinet-making traditions dating to the eighteenth century were absorbed into post-war production facilities. Two companies from this region, Cassina and B&B Italia, became the primary institutional channels through which architect-designed furniture reached the international market.
Cassina: from craft workshop to industrial partner
Cesare and Umberto Cassina established their company in Meda in 1927. The early operation was a small workshop producing historicist wooden furniture — the kind of pieces that equipped bourgeois apartments across northern Italy in the interwar period. The economic disruptions of the 1930s forced an adaptation: Cassina began manufacturing upholstered furniture for La Rinascente, the department store group, which required production volumes and delivery schedules that a purely artisanal operation could not sustain.
This reorganisation had a lasting structural effect. By the time Cesare Cassina approached Gio Ponti around 1950, the company had developed both the manufacturing capacity and the commercial distribution to act as a serious industrial partner for an architect. The collaboration began with several smaller objects and accelerated with the development of the Superleggera chair, which required seven years of prototype iteration before the final version reached production in 1957.
The Superleggera as manufacturing problem
The Superleggera is often discussed as a design object — its aesthetic economy, its reference to the traditional Chiavari chair from Liguria. But the challenge it posed to Cassina's workshop was primarily one of precision manufacturing. The ash frame's dimensions at the joints are calculated to tolerances that solid wood requires skilled hand-fitting. The seat caning, executed by hand, must be consistent enough to read as a flat surface under tension. The legs taper to a cross-section that makes machine cutting impractical; they were finished by hand with draw-knives.
This combination of industrial-scale production and hand-finishing defined Cassina's manufacturing identity through the 1950s and 1960s. The company was not a craft workshop pretending to be a factory, nor a factory applying craft aesthetics as a marketing strategy. It was a facility that had mapped precisely where hand work remained irreplaceable and built its production flow around that understanding.
The Carimate Chair and Vico Magistretti
Vico Magistretti's Carimate chair (1959), also produced by Cassina, approached the same problem from a different direction. Where Ponti's Superleggera eliminates every structural element that is not load-bearing, Magistretti's design uses a simplified Windsor-chair geometry — turned legs, a rush seat, a curved back rail — that reads as a direct translation of vernacular Italian furniture into a contemporary idiom. The frame is lacquered red; the seat rush is natural. The material contrast is not decorative but perceptual: it directs attention to the structural relationship between seat and back.
Magistretti and Cassina worked together on over a dozen objects between the late 1950s and 1970s. Their collaboration established a pattern — architect proposes structural concept, manufacturer solves production problem — that later characterised Cassina's relationships with Mario Bellini, Tobia Scarpa, and Paolo Buffa.
The Maestri series and the archive problem
From 1965 onward, Cassina began producing the Maestri series: licensed reproductions of classic designs by Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Gerrit Rietveld. The decision was commercially significant — by 2000, approximately 30 per cent of Cassina's sales came from the Maestri collection — but it also represented a particular curatorial position: that certain objects from the recent past required an authorised manufacturing infrastructure to survive accurately.
The licensing agreements required Cassina to work from original drawings and, in some cases, with surviving collaborators of the original designers. The LC2 armchair and LC3 sofa from the Le Corbusier–Perriand–Jeanneret series of 1928 were re-engineered from working drawings to ensure that the cushion proportions, steel diameter, and upholstery tension matched the original specifications. The result is not a museum reproduction but a functional piece manufactured to period standards using contemporary materials.
B&B Italia: polyurethane and the new upholstery
B&B Italia was founded in 1966 as C&B Italia, a joint venture between the furniture manufacturer Piero Ambrogio Busnelli and the architect Cesare Cassina (who had left the family company). The enterprise was built around a specific technological opportunity: cold-foam polyurethane, which had become available to furniture manufacturers in the mid-1960s and allowed entirely new structural approaches to upholstered seating.
Where traditional upholstery used springs, horsehair, and wadding layered over a wooden frame, polyurethane foam could be poured or cut to any profile and used structurally — as the chair's body rather than its padding. Mario Bellini's Camaleonda sofa (1970), produced by B&B Italia, exploited this directly: the modular units are foam bodies with a fabric cover, requiring no internal frame. The visual result — soft, irregular, stackable — would have been impossible with conventional upholstery technology.
Architect-manufacturer relationships: a specific model
Both Cassina and B&B Italia operated on a model of sustained architect partnerships rather than one-off commissions. A designer would typically develop a series of objects with a single manufacturer over a period of years, building a shared understanding of what that manufacturer's facilities could and could not produce. Mario Bellini worked with B&B Italia for over two decades; Afra and Tobia Scarpa maintained long-running relationships with both companies.
This model had consequences for what Italian furniture of the period looks like. The objects reflect not only the individual architect's formal ideas but the manufacturer's production constraints — the specific foam formulations B&B Italia had licensed, the hand-finishing skills available in Cassina's Meda workshop, the upholstery techniques refined over decades. The furniture is collaborative in a structural sense, not merely in attribution.
Sources and further reading
Cassina's official history is documented on the company's site and in several monographs, including the 2002 volume produced for the company's seventy-fifth anniversary. Andrea Branzi's broader study of Italian design, The Hot House (1984), provides theoretical context for the architect-manufacturer collaborations of the 1960s and 1970s. For B&B Italia specifically, Penny Sparke's Italian Design (1988) remains a useful overview of the polyurethane period.
Last updated: May 3, 2026. External sources: Cassina History · Encyclopedia of Design: Cassina · Oxford Reference: Cassina.