You’re so transparent: 10 years of Pedrali’s Nolita chair

When I asked the Como-based creative trio CMP Design if I could ask them a few questions about Nolita – a seating collection produced by Italian manufacturer Pedrali that’s clocked up 10 years of strong selling and an impressive body of reference projects – they replied, ‘We’re happy to answer all your questions in life.’ Great. No need for therapy or a priest anymore, then.

The boys’ tongue-in-cheek response (the ragazzi being Michele Cazzaniga, Simone Mandelli and Antonio Pagliarulo) is a reflection of the way they work – and of their work. On the one hand, they have an easiness and authenticity about them that results in warm and strong relationships with clients (and, indeed, certain British journalists) and on the other, they author products that are friendly, considered and – as is the case with Nolita – bring people together.

Created for outdoor settings and designed to encourage conviviality, Nolita possesses an optical lightness and formal playfulness whose linear, steel-rod motif ‘was born from the graphics on the bathing suits worn by the Beatles in a photo of them at the beach’. But a linearity that delivers a quasi-transparent effect wasn’t just an aesthetic decision. ‘We challenged ourselves to use the minimum possible material to create a comfortable seat,’ say the designers. ‘We wanted to design a chair made more of air than steel.’

We always start with a theme and collect design ideas around it. We research what has been designed in the past. We collect images that are connected to the theme, even if only by association of ideas. 13 years ago we decided to work on iron garden chairs. From there, very different concepts were born and the first of these to see the light, three years later, was Nolita.

The manufacturing technique of wrought-iron chairs, the automatic bending of tubes, the formal vocabulary of so-called international design, the transparency of the bell tower of Cologne Cathedral, and the hypnotic strings of Apollo's Lyre overlapped and combined in our minds.

Everything in our mind works as a potential ingredient for a project. The Muses, a group of female divinities associated with song, dance and creative inspiration, were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (memory). And, actually, the creative process is a gathering and combination of elements found in our memory, whether or not they are related to the object to be designed.

Since we are a group of designers, this process becomes a collective action, based on a sort of dialogue. Dialogue immediately brings to mind verbal communication, but for us it’s more like the creation of a large synoptic table in which sketches, photos and fragments of text converge. The first drawings emerge from there, and after that we choose which concepts are to be developed. That is, we combine those graphic signs with existing or specially developed production techniques. To give an idea of how unfathomable this path is on a purely rational level, just think that the first sketch of the Nolita rod motif was born from the graphics on the bathing suits worn by the Beatles in a photo of them at the beach!

We challenged ourselves to use the minimum possible material to create a comfortable seat. The number and distribution of the rods are designed to uniformly distribute the person's weight and minimise heat transfer. By interpolating the rods, we obtained the ideal surface described by a seated person. The structural tube is as light as possible. We wanted to design a chair made more of air than steel.

Our initial aspiration to design a timeless object is slowly being fulfilled. There are venues in our cities where the same Nolita chairs have been used for ten years. It is a pleasure to see them stay, as much as it is a pleasure to discover them in newly opened places or to bump into them on a trip to some remote location.

The notion of the design classic is often linked to the commercial outcome of a project, or to the quantity of visual information that is exchanged about it. This is what defines success in today’s general opinion. However, we like to think that commercial success is not necessary to define a classic, but that other values are needed to denote excellence. Among these, for us, is, first and foremost, the unity of form and function. An organic interdependence of one and the other. Putting them on an equal footing is an intuition, a technical find, an experimental outcome: in other words, a rarity.

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