Quaderna Dining Table

Designed between 1969 and 1972 for the traveling exhibition "L’invenzione della superficie neutra", the Quaderna table is based on regular geometric shapes in squared white laminate, a covering characterized by a rigorous, simple and perfect grid.

The products in the Quaderna Series are the result of a highly industrialized process and - at the same time - impeccable craftsmanship skills. The furniture is made from hollow core wood surfaced with white Print laminate with an isotropic checkered design with a 3 cm centre distance. The mesh is produced using digital printing that causes a slight variation in the centre distance of the lines and thus means it is necessary to create a body to cover that is not perfectly orthogonal in order to make all the lines on each side line up optically. The laminate pieces are applied individually according to a specific sequence: first the legs are covered, together with the thickness of the top, then the external faces and lastly the upper surface. This manual task requires extreme artisanal precision and uses the in laying technique which takes about eight hours of work to produce a single item of furniture. Every Quaderna object comes from a single sheet of laminate so that the centre distance is the same, albeit slightly misaligned by a few tenths of a centimeter: this is the only way the checkered surfaces prove continuous in the three dimensions guided by the Cartesian axes in keeping with the original project. The convergence of the lines of the mesh determines the total homogeneity of the surfaces and lends the furniture a strong styling personality, as they are visually marked in their corners. The difficulty in ensuring all the joints line up to the nearest millimeter makes it impossible to detach the legs from the table top even during transport. An additional complexity, however, an essential one to preserve the uniqueness of the original idea.

What we are talking about here are the terrible kids of Superstudio. In other words, in a given time in history when everything had to be criticized and rethought, in a season when the Italian architecture was passionate and which is now a myth, a group of young students wished to change the world from Florence and definitely managed to leave their mark, at least in our world, the design world. They began with the ‘constant monument’ idea, which wrapped up everything such as a squared magma, continued with the ‘histogram of architecture’, which generated without any effort furniture and ambiences whose “Super-surface was a mental attitude model,” and then finally arrived at the ‘Super-idea’, which beats time with a constant regularity, deliberately written in black and white, conceptually revealed and theoretically closed, eventually generating the Quaderna collection, the most architectural items ever seen in the long history of furniture, which Aurelio Zanotta was ready to turn into a myth. Zanotta starts producing Quaderna with the courage of a brand that always wants to experiment and has an eye for staying ahead of the times: it will follow the Neomodern and Postmodern wave with Alchimia and Memphis between the 70s and80s.