With #designdautore, Bardi inaugurates its new Florence Concept Store.
#DESIGNDAUTORE IN THE REVOLUTIONARY
VISION OF THE QUADRONE
A SPECIAL EXHIBITION CURATED BY CARLO BIMBI
A cocktail party event organised to experience the Quadrone, the innovative and ingenious transformable sofa
designed by INTERNOTREDICI and created by Bardi Italy.
Bardi Italy, with designers Carlo Bimbi and Nilo Gioacchini, will repropose the iconic sofa Quadrone for the #designdautore event. An opportunity to celebrate this unique sofa that, in the Seventies, revolutionized home living habits and consolidated the Company’s focus on design and innovation, without neglecting Tuscan craft tradition.
The iconic sofa is back in Bardi Italy’s collection, unchanged in its shapes and colour, to reconfirm a more-than-ever innovative concept that perfectly meets the changing requirements of our contemporary lives. It is a domestic place for relationships, where people talk and spend time together, but also a place for relax where one can read, rest, and sleep.
During the #designdautore event, the showroom will be dedicated to Quadrone with a special exhibition curated by Carlo Bimbi Design. The event will focus on the past and future of this iconic sofa, to highlight its evergreen role in our living.
The underlying philosophy of the Quadrone sofa was and still is transformability as a metaphor of modernity.
DESIGNERS
During the event, Carlo Bimbi and Nilo Gioacchini will share their experience in the world of Italian design from the Seventies to our days.
CARLO BIMBI
Carlo Bimbi opened his firm “Internotredici Associati” with Gianni Ferrara and Nilo Gioacchini in 1970. In 1985 he started working independently and created “Carlo Bimbi Design”. In Florence, he teaches at the Institute of Art “ISIA” and in the degree course in Industrial Design. He contributed to the foundation of “ADI Toscana” and has been a member of the INDEX commissions for Living (Abitare).
NILO GIOACCHINI
Nilo Gioacchini collaborates with “Marcello Nizzoli e Associati” in Milan, where he takes care of the Design area. With his firm “OpusDesign”, he operates in most varied areas, from Air Force Interior Design to Household Products. He received many awards during his career and his products are exhibited in some of the most important exhibitions of the sector, as New York’s MoMA.
#designdautore is the first of a series of events dedicated to design that will be held in the new Florence Concept Store to present the values of the Company in new ways.
To emphasize the attention of the company to design and innovation, a competition will be launched for young designers and students to design a new version of the Quadrone.
INTERNOTREDICI
This design studio, incorporated by Gianni Ferrara, Carlo Bimbi, and Nilo Gioacchini, has been operating in Florence in the period between the Sixties and Seventies. Gianni Ferrara has been a teacher of modelling applied to design in the Industrial Design course of the Art Institute of Porta Romana; he boasts prestigious collaborations, such as with architect Giovanni Michelucci for the Church of Saint John the Baptist on Autostrada del Sole (the main motorway crossing Italy). Carlo Bimbi and Nilo Gioacchini were students of Ferrara. They moved to Milan upon suggestion of Pierluigi Spadolini and worked there in the firm “Nizzoli Associati”, where they had the opportunity to collaborate with G. Mario Oliveri and Alessandro Mendini. When they returned to Florence, they founded the Internotredici group with Gianni Ferrara. This cooperation gave life to important projects, such as Turri di Bovisio’s Tuttuno, which was awarded with the participation in the New York exhibition of 1972 “Italy: The new domestic landscape”, today a MoMa permanent collection. In 1974, they designed the Quadrone sofa, which is considered a sort of manifesto of their work.
THE QUADRONE PHILOSOPHY
The Quadrone sofa was presented at the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 1975. Designed by the Florentine designers of Internotredici – Gianni Ferrara, Carlo Bimbi, and Nilo Gioacchini, it is a sort of manifesto of their philosophy.
In the Seventies, a period of protest and birth of avant-garde movements that enriched and stimulated the debate on industrial design, the Quadrone revolutionized the rules of living and proposed a new way of living the house, overcoming the rigid conventional division between the living and the sleeping areas.
Quadrone is a modular system that starts from the idea of the double bed, but offers the different functions of the sofa, the armchair, and twin beds by assembling or decomposing the different modules.
Accurate research has allowed the experimentation of technological solutions that could guarantee a simplification of the production process and, at the same time, offer maximum comfort.