hen Gufram owner Charley Vezza
first saw the deflated, Dalíesque disco balls
created by Dutch artist duo Rotganzen,
he knew they would be a perfect addition
to the nightclub-inspired collection he
was plotting.
Dancing had been on his mind since he
found an old catalogue of contract furniture
for discotheques in the Gufram archives.
Dating from the 1980s, it featured a series of
striking modular upholstered pieces. When
Vezza showed it to the designers at Milan-
based studio Atelier Biagetti, he kickstarted
one of his company’s most exciting
collaborations to date and a celebration of a
particularly innovative space and time for
Italian design.
‘There has been a growing interest in the
Radical design movement in the past five
years, and what it means for us today,’ says
Catharine Rossi. A design researcher with a
strong focus on the nightclub phenomenon,
she is co-curator of a new show at Vitra’s
Design Museum (see page 088). ‘There has
also been a growing interest in club culture,
an area in which these Radical designers were
active: the only spaces they actually built
were discos,’ she adds. Nightclubs gave them
space ‘to experiment and imagine... outside of
commercial and corporate constraints’. »
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Design