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.
How Zanotta's Quaderna project was born
The Seventies were years of transition and rethinking, but also of visionary utopia which revolutionised parameters, thinking, styles and perspectives. With its story, Quaderna table represents the utopia of those years. The radical movement attempts to "go beyond the disciplinary aspect of design, that is to say the re-composition of contradictions at formal level, destroying... the usual image of the product".The result is a vanguard style which provokes, on the one hand, and creates stimuli for the contemporary world, on the other. “Radical design” openly confuted not just the status of design, but the entire social context in which designers worked. An explicit criticism of the rigid and dogmatic functionalism of the academy, against which the movement wished to be seen as a liberating vision of life and design.
In 1969 the Superstudio group was working on the “Istogrammi”: objects built on the basis of a spatial mesh with an orthogonal pattern, adaptable to various scales, from design to town planning, hence the famous “Monumento continuo” (Continuous Monument). A sort of “Artificial landscape” that can be extended at will, like a large network, “connecting” everything. The theory of the Istogrammi led to the theory of an infinite world of objects yet to be invented that range from the pure flat surface, to the item of furniture, to architecture. Superstudio designs a single chequered surface which in the catalogue of the Serie Misura "M" dating back to 1969-72 includes a table, bed, chair, bench, coffee table, desk, wardrobe, stool, etc. Wooden furniture and objects covered with Print printed plastic laminate, finish 6, designed in 1969 by Superstudio on the occasion of the travelling exhibition "L’invenzione della superficie neutra", conceived by Archizoom, Clino Trini Castelli, Ettore Sottsass, Georges Sowden and Superstudio and manufactured solely for the Serie Misura “M”.
Part of the Serie Misura “M” is subsequently produced by Zanotta under the name Quaderna.
Zanotta consoles and tables, the start of production
The products in the Quaderna Series are the result of a highly industrialised 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 chequered 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 thick- ness of the top, then the external faces and lastly the upper surface. This manual task requires extreme artisanal precision and uses the inlaying 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 centimetre: this is the only way the chequered 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 millimetre makes it impossible to detach the legs from the tabletop even during transport. An additional complexity, however, an essential one to preserve the uniqueness of the original idea. The Quaderna Series by Zanotta now comprises eight ‘architectural shapes’ devised with 4 legs or with a bridge structure as per the original design: two tables (square and rectangular), a desk, a console and a low table, which have been supplemented with the new entries: namely the desk, the coffee table and the carpet.Zanotta on ARCHIPRODUCTS