24 ARCHDIGEST.COM
N
othing like the pressure of a deadline to get the creative
juices flowing. At least that was the case for designer-
couple Tobia and Afra Scarpa, who received an urgent
call from furniture maestro Cesare Cassina in November
1969: Could the Italian architect—son of a famous
architect father, Carlo—and his wife come up with a
radical new sofa in time for the Cologne trade show in January?
The Scarpas set to the task, inspired to use the material of the moment,
expanding polyurethane.
They proposed a seat at its most rudimentary. “At the beginning, the
workers did not understand that the leather covering was not supposed
to be taut... but to appear like a soft, creased fabric curled around this
soft mass and held together by a sort of giant metal spring,” Tobia later
explained. In no time, versatile seats called Soriana were produced and
taken to the fair, where the chair won the prestigious Compasso d’Oro
award for what Barbara Lehmann, head of Cassina’s historical archives,
calls “its visual complexity achieved with simplicity.”
The lumpy, lounge-worthy seats suited the
’70s, but in the decade that followed, Soriana
fell out of favor, causing Cassina to end produc-
tion in 1982. In recent years, it’s been making
a comeback.
“It’s like if Claes Oldenburg made a chair;
or a beanbag with more structure,” says Rodman
Primack, from AD100 firm RP Miller, who lives
with a family of Sorianas that his husband, Rudy
Weissenberg, inherited from his grandmother
in Guatemala. (She parked them around a brass
firepit.) Fellow AD100 honoree Kelly Wearstler
has a suite of Sorianas sheathed in flaxen fabric at
her Malibu beach house. And Shanan Campanaro,
founder of Brooklyn’s Eskayel textile studio,
recently redid her beat-up set in her brand’s
Medina jacquard. “It updates the pieces, making
a classic feel supermodern.” —HANNAH MARTIN
object lesson THE STORY BEHIND AN ICONIC DESIGN
1. A SORIANA SOFA IN NATE BERKUS AND
JEREMIAH BRENT’S LOS ANGELES HOUSE.
2. THE SEAT, IN BLUE COTTON-VELVET.
3. RONNIE SASSOON AND JAMES
CRUMP’S SOHO, NEW YORK CITY, LOFT.
4. KELLY WEARSTLER’S MALIBU PAD.
1. DOUGLAS FRIEDMAN; 2. COURTESY OF 1STDIBS; 3. FRANÇOIS HALARD. ARTWORK: LUCIO FONTANA. © 2020 ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK; 4. NICK HUDSON
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