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At the beginning of the 1968 revolution in Florence, the radical current burst into the field of architecture and design with the founding of the Superstudio group (1966), created by a group of architects and a new emblem of a spirit critical of the modernist movement.
Adolfo Natalini, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Roberto and Alessandro Magris, Gian Piero Frassinelli and Alessandro Poli, with Superstudio, became the symbol of a design freed from functionalism and rationalism, animated by creative spirit, continuous reinvention and contemplative will. The group's objects "tickled" all the senses, especially touch and sight, in search of spaces of freedom in the apathy of modernism.
Among Superstudio's most iconic productions is Bazaar, a modular sofa composed of double-curved fiberglass armchairs with ribbing, foam padding and acrylic fabric upholstery. With a structure that seemed to recall Cinderella's magic pumpkin, this sofa responded to the needs of the individual but also the community, creating an open and convivial space, a small island of sharing. An eccentric and visionary object that, freed from the form-function pair, opened up to the poetics of lines and forms.
While from the contamination of spaces with the Pop Art current came the Sofo sofa, one of Superstudio's first projects, later put back into production by Poltronova. Also modular, it is made of polyurethane foam and features a distinctive S-cut. The play of colors and pop lines encapsulated futurist and surrealist-type inspirations. Here form and fabric become inescapable elements of the sofa: it is the fabric that gives life to the design, which "looks like a big colorful object, perhaps a little abstract, like all things with a little joy that look like things from another world" (Adolfo Natalini, Superstudio 1966).
With these two sofas Superstudio affirmed the contemplative character of furniture, out of its functional role. Real "home sculptures" that were impossible to ignore, "physically and emotionally filling objects" that would break the indifference in the spaces of living, in the awareness that the home is the portrait of its inhabitant and therefore a living and poetic image.
The innovative charge of these models has granted them the title of milestones of Italian design; today they are rare objects sold at international auctions at very high prices.
