My training as a designer began in the 1950s, a period during which the typology of furniture was undergoing great evolution. The architects of those years designed new spaces, post-war reconstruction had to be fast and not very expensive financially, it was therefore necessary to build functional, smaller furniture, to exploit new materials which, produced serially, would contribute to a wide distribution.

In Padua they were too conservative, far from innovative environments; instead, in Milan there was a great fervor. Every time I felt inspired, having the opportunity to discuss ever new things with figures such as Ponti and Rosselli. With the latter, a collaboration was born to make a one-piece seat-backrest; together we made the first experiments with fiberglass and polyester resins. Thanks to my attendance in Milan, I became aware, through the architect Ponti, of a new plastic fabric: Flexa. With this material I upholstered the first series of the DU30 because I found in it excellent technical qualities and a great adaptability to the production line.

My designs have always had a single denominator: simplicity, linked to rationality and practicality together with the development of new techniques and new materials, always trying to obtain an appreciable aesthetic result; form must be an expression of substance.

In Italy we were, unfortunately, conditioned by technology and still had to proceed with artisanal means and methods while chasing imagination. An example could be the design of the DU43 chair, for the set-up of which I resorted to a normal, mass-produced fence mesh, because we did not have spot welding machines (spot welders) that could fix the light iron profiles onto each other to compose the lattice design. This is to demonstrate how design then had to "reckon" with the reality of equipment and materials. Idea and material complemented each other in the continuous search for new forms, different from the past for their functionality as well as for their aesthetics.

Gastone Rinaldi