Cesare Casati and Emanuele Ponzio Seating

A pair of plexiglas chairs originally designed for the provocative nightclub 'The Discoteca Il Grifoncino' in Bolzano. They come with their original uphols...

Stunning, extremely rare and important, plexiglass dining set designed by italian architects Cesare Casati and Emanuele Ponzio in 1968 for COMFORT, Italy complete with the original and wonderful two tone 'target' seat upholstery showing the influence of artists such as Kenneth Noland. The transparent plexiglass structure allows the seats and table top to appear as flying saucers floating in space. This is an extremely rare design and I have never seen the matching table before apart from in original period design journals. This beautiful design featured on the front cover of the first ever issue of CASA VOGUE magazine in November 1968 alongside avant garde plexiglass sculptures by Gino Marotta. PLEASE SEE IMAGE 2. The chairs were originally designed for the famous 'IL GRIFONCINO' nightclub in Bolzano Italy which was one of the most famous avant garde interiors of the entire radical space age period ,documented in most of the international design journals of the time and which also included plexiglass cloud sculptures and lighting by Gino Marotta. The original small set of prototype chairs fabricated for the IL GRIFONCINO were produced in a special type of transparent plexiglass with an invisible special additive which glows when in the prescence of 'black' light; a table also made from plexiglass but with an illuminated 'black' light base was also produced to accompany these prototype chairs and when the table light was switched on the seemingly transparent chairs suddenly changed color to glow blue and violet in the dark ! It was decided that the special 'black light' reactive additive was not necessary for the average client so when COMFORT decided to produce this design on a commercial basis in 1968 they went with using a standard and very thick 0.4" (10mm) transparent plexiglass. A new table by Casati...