70s Giancarlo Piretti ‘alky’ fauteuil for Castelli & Artifort
€580.00
Italian interior and industrial designer Giancarlo Piretti was born in 1940 in Bologna. He obtained his teaching degree in drawing at the Art Institute of Bologna (dates unknown), and continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna in 1960. From 1963 until 1970, he taught interior design at the Art Institute of Bologna.
Sometime in the 1960s, Piretti also joined Italian design company Castelli as an interior designer, creating home furniture and office furnishings. During his twelve years at Castelli, Piretti obtained numerous industrial patents for his designs, which were mostly chairs. Piretti’s work for Castelli garnered the company an international reputation in furniture design.
His most well-known design is the plastic folding Plia Chair (1968), which has sold over seven million copies since 1969 and is still in production. It won lots of international design awards and prices, and can be found in permanent collections in various museums world-wide, including Austria, Czech Republic, Slovenia and the United States.
In the late-1970s, Piretti worked with Argentine architect-designer Emilio Ambasz (b. 1943) on several award-winning designs, including the two ergonomic seating systems Vertebra (1975, winner of the Smau Industrial Design Award in 1979) and Dorsal (1981). From 1984 to 1986 Piretti worked for Castilia, a firm that was part of the Castelli group, that specialized in the production of home furniture characterized by functional and aesthetic systems.
In 1988, Piretti revealed The Piretti Collection in Chicago, which included over 50 different office chairs and seating styles.
Well-known designs of Piretti include the DCS 106 Stacking Chair (1965); Plona Lounge Chair (1969); Alky Chair (1970s); Plantone Folding Desk (1970); Plano (1971, Gold Medal IBD); Planto Coat Rack (1972); the System 61 modular sofa system (1973); Xylon Chair (1992, two G Mark Awards 1994); and the Torsion Seating Collection (1995-6, G Mark Award 1997).
Today, Piretti lives and works in Bologna with his son, designer Alessandro Piretti.
This Alky chair is in rare black leather, orginal with some minor spurs of usage in the leather to complete the character of this 70s design chair.
