A house we carry
The B&B Italia headquarters in Novedrate, in the province of Como, was built in 1972 to a design by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers: volumes hung from an external steel-tube frame, drawn at the same time as the Centre Pompidou and often described as its full-scale prototype. The building says something accurate about the company, a furniture maker that thinks like an engineer.
Piero Ambrogio Busnelli founded it in 1966, first as C&B Italia with Cesare Cassina, continuing alone under the present name in the early 1970s. The founding innovation was cold-moulded expanded polyurethane. Foam injected into moulds produces sculpted volumes traditional padding cannot, and it took the workshop to industrial scale. Afra and Tobia Scarpa's Coronado sofa, from that same year, was the first application.
What followed belongs to postwar design history. Gaetano Pesce's UP series of 1969 was compressed and vacuum-packed, springing back into shape when the buyer opened it. Mario Bellini's modular Camaleonda of 1970 has been reissued. His Le Bambole won the Compasso d'Oro in 1979. Antonio Citterio has been the most constant collaborator, from Diesis in 1979 to Charles in 1997.
Artopia carries B&B Italia in Geneva, indoor and outdoor. The catalogue is large, so it helps to arrive with dimensions and a floor plan rather than a single model in mind.