Zanotta Tonietta

The Tonietta chair is a telling example of a product born of close, fruitful collaboration between the company and the designer. The project for the chair began in 1981 and was completed in 1985, after continuous technical research was needed to exploit a technology – aluminium die-casting – that until then had been little used in the manufacture of a domestic chair because of its cost. 'I was particularly hostile to the trend of overloading objects, including chairs, with the technological or typological arrogance of design: I wanted to design the simplest chair, one that is almost obvious, not an object that appears different at any cost. After careful analysis I saw that, among modern chairs, those by Thonet best embody the idea of an archetypal image, and so I decided to let the character of my chair enter into dialogue with that single example of a high-quality piece, laden with semantic and symbolic values.' The Tonietta chair won the prestigious Compasso d'Oro Award in 1987 with the following statement from the jury: 'This chair represents a great lesson in style and culture – it recalls an archetype and avoids all banal imitations of morphological elements.'