Novedrate, November 2013 - Founded in 1966 thanks to the entrepreneurial farsightedness of Piero Ambrogio Busnelli, B&B Italia is a leading Italian company in the international scene of design furnishings. The company has built its success on the ability to represent contemporary culture, to sense and anticipate trends, and to respond to changes in taste and living requirements. The company’s strong belief in design, the creativity of its projects and the audacious experimentation that has marked its DNA since the very beginning, express a strong vocation for research, which has led to a series of records in the fields of technology, design and also architecture.

TOWARDS THE FUTURE: PIANO AND ROGERS’ ARCHITECTURE FOR B&B ITALIA

40 years anniversary since the construction of the B&B Italia headquarters in Novedrate, project by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers

Today it would be hard to find an entrepreneur willing to ask a young architect just starting out to design the new headquarters for his business. And yet this is exactly what happened forty years ago when a young Piero Ambrogio Busnelli (born 1927), looking for an architect to build the new headquarters for his company, met the most promising talent in the history of contemporary Italian architecture: Renzo Piano (born 1937), who is now internationally acclaimed as one of the great builders of the new artificial landscape. Back then he was just a brilliant architect (already associated with Richard Rogers, another future Master of avantgarde architecture), who like all young people, was out looking for opportunities to create his visions and utopias.

If an entrepreneur’s talent lies - in addition to successfully inventing and managing his own industrial project - in “sensing the future”, as Hans Hollein writes in reference to architects, then Piero Ambrogio Busnelli managed to achieve this as well. The B&B Italia headquarters, conceived by him together with Piano as a light, semi-transparent building freed from the weight of gravity and projected towards the future, is not just - still today - the living proof of a level of experimentation and innovation that was exceptional in Italian architecture at that time: it undertakes an even more important value when viewed from the perspective of the history of industrial architecture.

Designed at the same time as the Centre Pompidou - the building that brought Piano and Rogers to worldwide fame - the B&B Italia headquarters represent a sort of full scale prototype of the building concepts applied to create the “Beaubourg”, as the Centre Pompidou is also known. Even before building began on the large, revolutionary arts centre in Paris, Piano had the chance to test out in Novedrate the idea of a living space “suspended” from an external structure made from steel pipes: a design which simultaneously allowed to use large transparent vertical surfaces (the walls no longer have to be load-bearing), free the space (increasing its flexibility and allowing for adaptation to different functions) and bring the inhabitants and the building itself into a dialogue with the green space outside.

B&B Italia’s physical headquarters thus became a “manifesto” of its industrial business culture: innovative materials and construction solutions, functional flexibility of products systems, as well as careful research to ensure their strength and long life - against any type of planned or involuntary obsolescence - thus creating a link between the building and the products created inside it.

Press contacts B&B Italia: Fiorella Villa PR & Communication Manager_fiorella.villa@bebitalia.it - Barbara Carraretto T. +39.031.795327 barbara.carraretto@bebitalia.it

B&B Italia S.p.A. 22060 Novedrate (CO) Italy, Strada Provinciale 32 - tel +39 031 795 111 fax +39 031 791 592 - info@bebitalia.com www.bebitalia.com

Piano, who was the main responsible for the project at the Piano and Rogers studio*, was the clear interpreter of this new industrial culture, the prophet of that which in the years to come was to become the identity of the company of Busnelli, open to research and experimentation. Of course the architect was inspired by certain fundamental principles of modernism - Le Corbusier’s plan libre, fluidity between the interior and the exterior spaces, minimalist elements - but he also added the technical advancements of metal construction techniques, so that the inhabited “container” seems to float within the framework of the structures that have been brought outside.

To emphasize this floating idea Piano created the access to the offices from the outside with a short overhanging ramp and a passageway between the offices and the existing factory (Afra and Tobia Scarpa, 1968), fully glazed and suspended in air: a poetic and forward-looking gesture, taking into account possible future extensions (such as the Research and Development Centre, by Antonio Citterio and Partners, 2002), a design approach open to innovation and providing continuity between the ideas of the company’s founder and those of the next generation of B&B Italia entrepreneurs.

Stefano Casciani

DetailsB&B Italia offices, Novedrate (Co), 1971-73Architect: Piano and RogersDesigners Renzo Piano, C. Brullman, S. Cereda, G. Fascioli, F. Marano

Bibliographic note* “...Essentially by Piano are the offices of B & B Italia in Novedrate… ”, in, P. Buchanan, editor, Renzo Piano, Umberto Allemandi & C., Turin 1993, p. 50

SourcesM. Mastropietro, R. Gorla, editor, Un’industria per il design, Lybra Immagine, Milan 1983 (1st ed.), 1999 (2nd ed.) P. Buchanan, editor, Renzo Piano, ibid.Renzo Piano, Giornale di bordo, Passigli Editore, Florence 1997