21.02.2019

UniFor. Solutions for Architecture. 50 Years Of Design

Unifor 50-year Anniversary installation at Palazzo Brera

For the occasion, during the Milan Design Week, UniFor presents a prestigious multimedia installation curated by Ron Gilad at Palazzo of Brera, home of important institutions such as the Academy of Fine Arts and the Pinacoteca di Brera. In the Cortile d'Onore, in the Sala Napoleonica and in the Sala della Passione, for the first time, Ron Gilad links UniFor’s industrial culture with the educational values of one of Italy’s oldest schools, the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, and with the masterpieces of art history conserved in the Pinacoteca di Brera. An extension of the installation will take place in the historical Showroom of the Company, in Corso Matteotti 14 in Milan, presenting highlights from the past and the present of UniFor.

For the occasion it is retracing five key decades in the history of Italian design and telling the story of its own historic journey in a new book edited by Fulvio Irace, with graphics by Pierluigi Cerri, and published by Skira.

50 years of an Italian success story: the life of a company, UniFor, that has propelled Italian design to international prominence. Projects, products, architects, and designers in a book that reconstructs the backstage and originality of a production method and system centered on the spaces that foster community.

The story begins in the 1970s in Turate, in the province of Como, when Angelo Mangiarotti designed the first headquarters and plant, to be gradually enlarged as the business grew. The model factory was based on a system of vertical integration that permitted obsessive attention to quality control, while the classic simplicity of the campus became a living manifesto of the company’s spirit of enterprise.

It was no coincidence that Angelo Mangiarotti also designed one of UniFor’s first successful furniture series, the 4D, alongside another bestseller and longseller, the Modulo 3 by Bob Noorda and Franco Mirenzi. These were joined over the years by more extraordinary and iconic products: Naòs System by Studio Cerri & Associati, Less by Jean Nouvel, Element Office Collection by Foster + Partners, MDL System by Michele de Lucchi, Parete AP by Andrée Putman, Moodway by Fernando Urquijo, Flipper FortyFive by Pagani and Perversi, Régua by Álvaro Siza, the Parigi chair by Aldo Rossi, and many others.

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