Dino Gavina; furniture designer & entrepreneur
Hyfler/Rosner
May 9, 2007
Dino Gavina
Entrepreneur whose enthusiasm for Bauhaus ideas helped to
establish the high reputation of Italian furniture design
The Italian entrepreneur Dino Gavina was one of the
matchmakers in the marriage of cultural trends and
manufacturing technology that bred the modern design
industry.
More specifically, it was Gavina who first put into mass
production designs for furniture by members of the Bauhaus,
so giving the wider public the chance to bring into their
homes styles that had once been the preserve of a few. It
was a democratisation of taste whose heirs have included
Terence Conran and Ikea.
Fifty years ago there was no notion of "designer" goods -
items prized for the cachet of their creator's name yet
widely available. Instead, most expensive objects - dresses
or furniture - were handmade one-offs, while mass-produced
goods tended to be utilitarian.
Then in 1962 Gavina, who owned a small furniture business in
Bologna, flew to New York to meet Marcel Breuer. In the
1920s Breuer had taught cabinetmaking at the Bauhaus, the
influential German school of art and architecture, where he
had attempted to fuse industrial processes with creative
impulses.
His experiments had been cut short when the Nazis closed the
school in 1933, but Gavina wished to resuscitate his ideas.
Initially a mere manufacturer of seats for railway
carriages, he had come to art and design through a
friendship with the painter Lucio Fontana and he now
approached the business with the passion of a zealot. He and
Breuer quickly hit it off, and Gavina returned to Italy with
permission to manufacture multiple copies of Breuer's
best-known design, the Wassily chair.
The tubular-steel frame of the seat had been inspired by the
handlebars of Breuer's racing cycle, and had been admired by
the painter Wassily Kandinsky, a colleague at the Bauhaus.
Forty years after its conception, Gavina was struck by how
modern the design remained, and his instinct that others
would share his liking for it were proved correct by the
sales when he put it into production. The chair became a
fixture of homes and offices around the world, and a small
revolution had begun.
Dino Gavina was born just outside Bologna in 1922. The son
of a builder, he was an unruly child and had little formal
education. He began work as a doorman at a theatre, and from
there progressed to helping to make set designs. By 1948 he
had a backstreet workshop that made, among other things,
seats for army jeeps, as well as occasional items of
contemporary furniture.
One such was a desk that he made for Fontana, and it was
through him that he met the designer Pier Giacomo
Castiglioni. Theirs was to become one of the key
partnerships in Italian industry. In 1960, with the
architect Carlo Scarpa, they set up a furniture company, and
in 1962 a lighting manufacturer, Flos. Modern furniture was
then barely known in Italy, and the two businesses were to
become cornerstones of what was soon the country's
flourishing home-design sector.
Gavina himself was not so much a designer as a cultural
impresario. Happy to delegate, he perhaps saw his main role
as that of support and inspiration. A modest, boyish,
intensely curious perfectionist, he was also open to
influence himself, and cultivated friendships with Man Ray,
Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp - the latter's work
filled the showroom which Gavina opened in Rome.
In 1967 Gavina opened the Duchamp Centre in Bologna, a space
given over to helping designers to realise projects.
The success of the Wassily chair and other items allowed
Gavina to sell his business to the US firm Knoll, which also
had connections to Bauhaus, in 1968.
He later started other furniture companies, including Simon
International, and promoted several philosophies for modern
design. Thus Ultrarazionale was his campaign in the late
1960s to free designers from strict Modernism, allowing room
for more personal expression; Metamobile was a programme in
the mid-1970s that sought to create cheap, self-assembly
furniture that did not neglect aesthetics. From the early
1980s Gavina taught university students in Rome, and in
recent years had been the subject of a number of
retrospective exhibitions.
He and his wife had two daughters, although as befitted one
who rebelled against the banality of conformism his personal
life was unorthodox and embraced several other long-standing
relationships. He died in Bologna, having recently suffered
a heart attack.
Dino Gavina, furniture designer and entrepreneur, was born
on November 7, 1922. He died on April 5, 2007, aged 84