Solids

In 1983, the year in which his partnership with Franca Stagi came to an end, Cesare Leonardi returned to the designing of furniture. Ten years earlier, in 1973, the oil crisis and the ensuing rise in the cost of synthetic materials had brought the production of items in fibreglass to a halt, nipping in the bud his enthusiasm for a series of assemblable containers designed for the Peguri Mobili company of Santa Maria di Sala (Venice), studied at length and already presented to the public at the Salone del Mobile that same year.The Dondolo Rocking Chair and the Ribbon Chair, icons of an era which had witnessed the emergence of Italian design throughout the world, were taken off the producers’ price lists. This episode led him to a definitive realisation: that of the impossibility of making a coherent design research correspond to industrial and market logics. To the point that when he decides to start working on design again, he does so by coming up with a series of furnishings ‘for himself’. He wants to experiment with a crafts approach, in which he himself is the creator, from the drawing board to the construction phase, without any forms of compromise or mediation.The starting point was not the planning of one or more objects, but of a system. This was the beginning of the ‘Solidi’, a series made up of multiple furnishing elements using a single material: fir wood painted yellow, 27 mm in thickness (usually used for concrete formwork) and of a single format: a board 50 cm wide and 150 cm long (or multiples and submultiples: 100, 150, 200, 250, 300 cm). The ‘rule’ he sets is the following: the wooden board must be traced and cut in such a way that all the pieces contribute to form the solid, without wasting material.What might look like a very restrictive condition actually paves the way to infinite and surprising configurations, as shown by the hundreds of pieces of furniture that Cesare was to produce in the studio’s carpentry workshop. Chairs, most of all, but also stools, tables, wardrobes, sofas and platform floors. A ‘global’ solution destined to the furnishing of living spaces, unitary and at the same time flexible. Also in terms of positioning, since most of the Solids are designed to have castors.