In this his first design work for Cassina, Rodolfo Dordoni has come up with a collection of extraordinary lightness and constructional know-how, authentic structural cabinet-making joinery and taut leather surfaces. This is a project that inevitably calls up not only a comparison with the great legacy of Gio Ponti, but also the teaching of Franco Albini.
Dordoni has tackled the commission demonstrating his mastery of his materials and his capability of availing himself of Cassina’s vast realm of experience, without the need to give himself over to a thrill of meeting a challenge. On the contrary, echoes of the great masters appear in the design not as quotations but rather as antidote to the risks of a skeletal minimalism. In designing Pilotta - chair, full-size and small armchairs, and ottomans - Dordoni stays clear of working on elementary geometrical lines or the essential nature of a conceptual approach. His path is rather the modelling of the outlines, the study of the joints and structural cross-winds as the occasion to create a real and proper shape-and-form grammar with constructional technology. Wholehearted simplicity that redeems the force of the triangle and diagonal elements.
Light but never spindly, Dordoni’s designs call to mind the serene self-possession of the bourgeois home, not the need for surprises one after the other but rather the solid quality of the articles. Seats and backs that provide solid support without skimping on the comfort, solidity without excessive bulk, wood and leather.
Designer: Rodolfo Dordoni
Italy
