Werner Blaser

Werner Blaser (1924-2019) was a Swiss architect and designer, remembered above all for being the author of the first modern designer furnishings to be produced by the Molteni & C. company in the 1950s, a period in which the brand was already one of the largest furniture industries in Italy but was still dedicated solely to traditional style furnishings. Werner Blaser, on the other hand, came from cosmopolitan experiences and excellent teachers: he had in fact been Alvar Aalto's practitioner in Finland, then he moved to Chicago to study at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and there he met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, with whom he worked for a long time, even managing the publication of various volumes on his architecture. A great lover of Japan, a nation to which he traveled several times, his furnishings were greatly influenced by Japanese culture. The meeting with Molteni took place in 1955, on the occasion of the first “Selective Exhibition – International Furniture Competition” in Cantù, in which he was awarded the first prize by an international jury led by Gio Ponti (who also would have hoped for the victory of a exponent of Italian design) with a project produced as a prototype by the Brianza company. In 1957 Werner Blaser opened a studio in Basel which he will lead until the 2000s. In addition to various architectural projects in the Far East, he will have the opportunity to return to furniture design, especially between the 60s and 70s thanks to the collaboration with the Dutch brand Spectrum.