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A vintage Mid-Century Modern coffee table ( tavolo con route ) from Gae Aulenti, the original for Fontana Arte, with glass top and swivel wheels in good condition. The Italian industrial trolley was used to transport glass in the Fontana Arte plant. Wear consistent with age and use. Circa 1990, Milan, Italy.
Gae Aulenti was born in 1927, in Palazzolo dello Stella, Italy and passed away in 2012. She was a prolific architect and designers including industrial design, interior design, furniture, stage design, and lighting. Aulenti studied architecture at the Polytechnic University of Milan. She was one of a the women designing in the postwar period in Italy. Well known for her large scale museum projects including Muse dOrsay in Paris and the restoration of Palazzo Grassi in Venice.
FontanaArte is an Italian lighting and design company founded in 1931, in Milan, Italy. Founded by the two well-known Italian architect and designers Giovanni Ponti and Pietro Chiesa. The company is specialized in elegant lamps and glass furniture. Well-known artists have worked and designed for FontanaArte, like the famous Italian architect Piero Castiglioni or Franco Raggi. Today FontanaArte is owned by the Italian Creation Group.Creator: Fontana Arte (Manufacturer),Gae Aulenti (Designer)Dimensions: Height: 11 in (27.94 cm)Width: 47 in (119.38 cm)Depth: 47 in (119.38 cm)Style: Mid-Century Modern (In the Style Of)Materials and Techniques: Glass,Rubber,Hand-CraftedPlace of Origin: ItalyPeriod: Late 20th CenturyDate of Manufacture: circa 1990Condition: GoodWear consistent with age and use.Seller Location: West Palm Beach, FLReference Number: 1stDibs: LU1622215960011Shop All Gae Aulenti
Gae Aulenti
The Italian architect and designer Gae Aulenti will forever be best remembered for her work with museums, in particular her 198086 renovation of a Beaux Arts Paris train station to create the galleries of the Muse dOrsay. Aulenti whose first name, short for Gaetana, is pronounced guy should also be recalled for her tough intellectual spirit and for working steadily when few women found successful architectural careers in postwar Italy.
After she graduated from the Milan Polytechic in 1954, Aulenti opened an architectural office. She also joined the staff of the progressive architectural magazine Casabella, whose editorial line was that the establishment, orthodox modernism of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus, had outlived it usefulness. When their movement for fresh approaches to architecture and design received a sympathetic hearing, Aulenti found patrons most prominently Gianni Agnelli, of Fiat, who later employed her to renovate the Palazzo Grassi in Venice for use as an arts exhibition space.
Commissions for showrooms and other corporate spaces brought Aulenti to furniture design. She felt that furniture should never dominate a room. Her chairs and sofas low-slung, with rounded enameled metal frames and ample seats and tables, particularly her 1972 marble Jumbo coffee table for Knoll, project solidity and sturdiness. In lighting design, however, Aulenti is bravura.
Each work has a marvelous sculptural presence. Pieces such as her Pipistrello table lamp and Quadrifoglio pendant are a perfect marriage of organically shaped glass and high-tech fixtures. Others have a futuristic elegance and some even have a touch of personality. Aulentis Pileino and La Ruspa table lamps each look almost like little robots. Her lighting pieces are an artful grace note in the career of a woman who believed in strength.
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Fontana Arte
Best known for its elegant and innovative vintage lighting fixtures, the Milan-based firm Fontana Arte pioneered one of the key features of 20th-century and contemporary Italian design: the union of artistry and industry wrought by partnerships between creative talents chiefly architects and entrepreneurial businesses. Fontana Arte is further distinguished by having had as artistic director, in succession, four of Italys most inventive modernist designers: Gio Ponti, Pietro Chiesa, French transplant Max Ingrand and Gae Aulenti.
The bread and butter of the glassmaking company that Luigi Fontana founded in 1881 was plate-glass panels for the construction industry. In 1930, Fontana met Ponti then the artistic director of the Richard Ginori ceramics workshop and the editor of the influential magazine Domus at a biannual design exhibition that became the precursor to todays Milan Design Triennale, and the two hatched an idea for a furniture and housewares firm. Fontana Arte was incorporated in 1932 with Ponti as its chief of design. He contributed several lamps that remain among the companys signature works, including the orb-atop-cone Bilia table lamp and the 0024 pendant a stratified hanging sphere.
The following year, Fontana Arte partnered with the influential Milan studio glassmaker and retailer Pietro Chiesa, who took over as artistic director. Chiesas designs for lighting as well as for tables and items including vases and ashtrays express an appreciation for fluidity and simplicity of line, as seen in works such as his flute-shaped Luminator floor lamp and the 1932 Fontana table an arched sheet of glass that is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Six years after Chiesas 1948 death, the cole des Beaux Artstrained Max Ingrand took over as head of design at Fontana Arte. Ingrand brought a similarly expressive formal sensibility to wares such as lamps and mirrors, but he also had a masterful eye for the manipulation of glass surfaces whether they be cut, frosted, acid-etched or sand-blasted. His classic design is the Fontana table lamp of 1954, which has a truncated cone shade and curved body, both of which are made of pure, chic white-frosted glass.
Following Ingrand, the often-audacious Italian architect Gae Aulenti served as the companys artistic director from 1979 to 1996, and while she generally insisted that furnishings take second place aesthetically to architecture, she made an exception for Fontana Arte pieces such as the Tavolo con Ruote series of glass coffee and dining tables on wheels, bold lighting pieces such as the Parola series and the Giova, a combination flower vase and table lamp. As a key incubator of modern design under Aulentis tenure, Fontana Arte remained true to its long-held commitment creating objects that have never been less than daring.
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