Piero Bottoni and the Diffusion of Modern Furniture in Italy. Furniture for Villa Davoli, Reggio Emilia 1934-35

By Stefano Poli, Politecnico di Milano and Università di Genova

Piero Bottoni's commitment to the design of the modern domestic environment gained international prominence at the 1930 Monza Triennale. Alongside Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini, he contributed to the Casa Elettrica project. Conceived by its architects as a model home for the implementation of advanced architectural concepts and domestic equipment, this small villa was temporarily erected in Monza's park and remained a symbol of the Italian architectural renewal of the 20th century.

Based on a simple yet precise geometric design, the kitchen furniture of the Casa Elettrica, designed by Guido Frette with Adalberto Libera and manufactured by the Crippa company in Lissone, was suitable for mass production, a direction that Bottoni would pursue in his subsequent projects, both in construction techniques and furnishings.

It was indeed three years later, during the V Milan Triennale, that Bottoni, along with Enrico Agostino Griffini, Eugenio Giacomo Faludi, and Mario Pucci, created a colony of five holiday homes in Milan’s Castello Sforzesco park, adjacent to Giovanni Muzio's new exhibition building. These were small single-family houses built with experimental techniques and materials, complete with all interior furnishings and meticulously finished. The furniture designed by the group of architects, primarily using national woods, showed a clear kinship with those created by Bottoni about a year later for Villa Davoli in Reggio Emilia and for other private commissions.

With their simple and sturdy lines, borrowed from the solids of plane geometry - the cylinder, the cube, and the parallelepiped - they served primary functions, eliminating frills, decorations, and superficial embellishments.

The armchairs (lot 132) in the bedroom of Villa Davoli villa, therefore, appear closely related to the chairs exhibited at the IV and V Triennale in 1933 and the wooden furnishings that Bottoni proposed to other clients in the same years. Meanwhile, the extendable table, equipped with a second shelf below the main one, displays a reworked solution already used for the tables found in some of the five holiday homes.

Around the same years, Bottoni was among the first to establish a direct collaboration with Meroni & Fossati in Lissone, one of Lombardy's most active furniture production companies. Alongside a vast catalogue of eclectic furniture imitating past styles, the company first introduced a line of furniture imitating French Art Deco examples and, finally, a line of 'rational' furniture, including a model of armchair designed by Bottoni, with seats and backs made of elastic straps patented by Knoll.