Joint force

Gianfranco Frattini’s immaculately crafted 1974 ‘Kyoto’ table proves a natural fit for Poltrona Frau in 2020

- ROSA BERTOLI

Gianfranco Frattini was a key figure in the development of modern Italian design. Graduating from Milan’s Politecnico in 1953 (around the same time as Vittorio Gregotti, Cini Boeri, Gae Aulenti and other future architecture and design legends), he started out at Gio Ponti’s studio before setting up his own practice. ‘The generation of architects who started their careers just after the Second World War were followers of Ernesto Nathan Rogers’ motto: “From the spoon to the city”,’ writes designer and curator Marco Romanelli in his book, Ritrovare Gianfranco Frattini Rediscovered. Everything had to be designed anew, he explains. The horrors and destruction of the war created a craving for an aesthetic clean slate. ‘Renaissance was unstoppable.’

Frattini took Rogers’ motto literally, moving seamlessly between scales, from jewellery to buildings. Active during a pivotal shift in Italian furniture manufacturing, from the painstakingly handmade to the factory-made, he collaborated with the industrial entrepreneurs of the time. But it is his relationship with craftsman Pierluigi Ghianda (of Bottega Ghianda, W*218) that resulted in some of the most memorable designs of his career. One of these, the ‘Kyoto’ table, has now been given a new lease of life by Poltrona Frau.

‘The relationship with Frattini’s archive started with us getting to know Marco Romanelli’s body of research,’ says Nicola Coropulis, Poltrona Frau’s general manager. ‘Frattini was one of the enlightened bourgeois architects of Milan and had an unparalleled knowledge of design and understanding of spatial dimension.’