In the 1950s, the typology of furniture was undergoing two parallel evolutions. Single pieces—chair, table, small-sized furniture designed for specific or multiple uses—followed a formal and qualitative evolution with an increasingly vast selection of materials used.

Architects of the fifties designed new spaces; post-war reconstruction had to be fast and economically inexpensive, so it was necessary to build functional, smaller furniture, and to exploit new materials that, produced serially, would contribute to a wide distribution. Therefore, the architectural evolution was transforming the traditional concept of storage furniture.

"Aesthetic taste" struggled to adapt to these new designs, and the spotlight was primarily on the younger generations, considering them as potential users.

Once the conformist diffidence of the past was overcome, these products were accepted even in heterogeneous environments, and confirmation of this is to be found in the increasingly vast distribution they enjoyed in the middle and upper social classes.

Personally, I looked at Danish and American production with admiration. A great incentive came to me from the intellectual ferment that characterized magazines such as Stile Industria and Domus, which were attentive to Italian and foreign novelties.

In Italy, we were, unfortunately, conditioned by technology and still had to proceed with artisanal means and methods, chasing imagination.

An example of this is the design of the chair DU 43; for its fabrication, I resorted to a normal wire mesh, mass-produced, because we did not have "spot" welders (spot-welding machines) that could fix the lightweight iron sections one on top of the other to compose the grid design. This is to demonstrate how design then had to "reckon" with the reality of equipment and materials.

Idea and matter complemented each other in the continuous search for new forms, different from the past due to their functionality as well as their aesthetics.

GASTONE RINALDI