Dino Gavina

Dino Gavina (1922-2007) was one of the great protagonists of the Italian designer of the twentieth century. He was above all as an entrepreneur, having founded or contributed to founding numerous companies that went down in history: from Gavina spa (later sold to Knoll, who made it the heart of its European division Knoll International) to Flos, followed by Simon (today integrated into the Cassina) and the Paradisoterrestre gallery in Bologna. Gavina has left traces everywhere in the world of design, contributing to the creation of iconic products now scattered in the catalogs of many of the main brands in the sector and launching the careers of designers who have made the history of the discipline. Born in Bologna, he came to the world of design from the theatre, an area in which he dealt with staging and set design while Parallelo earned his living with his car accessories shop which also dealt in furnishing items, founded in 1953. He was the painter Lucio Fontana introduced him to design, introducing him to some personalities of the Milanese elite of the time such as Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni. Other key meetings are those with the Japanese designer Kazuhide Takahama and with the great architect Carlo Scarpa, whom Gavina will want as president and leading designer of his Gavina spa, founded in 1960. The first product launched by Gavina was the Sanluca armchair by the Castiglioni brothers, today a great bestseller in the Poltrona Frau catalogue. Among the designers with whom he collaborated in his early years was also the great master of the Bauhaus Marcel Breuer, whom he met in New York in 1962. In the same year he founded Flos in partnership with Cesare Cassina, initially conceived as an experimental laboratory to create lamps with new materials polymers but destined to become the most famous lighting company in the world. A visionary and experimental figure, however, Gavina was not made for the management of large and complex large-scale enterprises: having sold Gavina to the Americans and leaving the shares of Flos, in 1968 he founded the new Simon brand together with his historic partner Maria Simoncini, dedicated to furniture of strong artistic and cultural value such as the Ultramobile collection whose products bear the signatures of the great names of surrealism of the 1930s such as Man Ray, Meret Oppenheim and Sebastian Matta. In 1973 he returned to the world of light, assuming the artistic direction of little Sirrah and bringing all his favorite signatures such as Takahama and Man Ray. Many of the most beautiful Sirrah products will then flow into the Nemo catalogue, while the company will be taken over by iGuzzini in the 1990s. Instead, the collaboration with Enzo Mari for the Metamobile collection dates back to 1974, a pioneer of the Ikea aesthetic of "Do It Yourself". His last major enterprise is Paradisoterrestre, founded in 1983 and initially dedicated to the creation of outdoor furniture and street furniture, but which evolved into a gallery that reissues many of the most famous pieces of Gavina's career, an attempt at an impossible sum of his inexhaustible oeuvre.