Achille Castiglioni, Pier Giacomo Castiglioni - Zanotta - Stool - Mezzadro

The Mezzadro stool is a seat designed by Italian designers Pier Giacomo Castiglioni and Achille Castiglioni in 1957 for the Italian furniture company Zanotta. The seat is considered an icon of Italian design, from the late 1950s, due to the innovative idea of the designers. The stool up for auction was taken over from a mountain chalet in the Belluno Dolomites (Veneto) . It was disassembled and the chrome parts and the steel seat were polished. The wooden part was also polished. So it is now in excellent condition of use. Stool dimensions in cm: Height 51 - Width 49 - Depth 51 'Design Radicale' offers insured shipping to Italy and Europe, shipping costs as shown. The first prototype of the Mezzadro stool was exhibited at the 10th Milan Triennale in 1954 and was then displayed in 1957, in the same exhibition, as the definitive model. [1] It was later improved for Villa Olmo, in Como, in 1957, subsequently produced by Zanotta in 1971. [2] [3] Mezzadro is a stool obtained from the Castiglioni brothers' research into finding a seat that was comfortable and logical, referring to the typical Ready-made Dadaist composition, the decontextualization of an object. [4] He concluded that the seat of a tractor was ideal for combining the Dadaist philosophy and his search for comfort. Indeed, Mezaadro is none other than the seat of a tractor turned into an ironic, playful stool for domestic use, with a simple and unusual composition. This having fun designing creative products with different meanings is typical of Castiglioni designs. [5] Project idea The Castiglioni, in search of new technologies and suitable products for a mass-production process, arrived at the creation of Mezzadro through ironic and perfectly functional assembly of industrial parts. [6] This product somewhat negates what the notion of design is, being a ready-made range. Constructed by assembling objects of various kinds that apparently have nothing to do with each other, this stool is an agricultural tractor seat, mounted on a crossbow stabilised by a wooden peg. Etymology To stay in line with the project idea, the Castiglioni brothers decided to give the stool the name Mezzadro, referring to the life of the fields, from which the product was born. The term sharecropper refers to a peasant (at the head of a farmhouse) working a farm, associated with the owner owning the sharecropping contract (now abolished) .