Ignazio Gardella’s Blevio table joins Molteni&C’s Heritage Collection, inaugurating a partnership with the Gardella Historical Archive: the first episode of a relationship based on research and exchange, destined to develop over the years to come. In 2015 Milan’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna, restructured by Gardella himself, hosted the exhibition on Molteni&C’s 80 years in the furniture business. Designed in 1930, Blevio is a table that Gardella (1905-1999) made as a single model for his own family home, Villa Usuelli in Blevio on Lake Como. It is an extraordinarily harmonious and timeless piece of furniture, which today becomes collective heritage; it combines the purest features and intrinsic simplicity. Gardella was already an established figure on the Italian architecture scene and in those same years he designed Alessandria’s Vittorio Emanuele III Sanatorium (1928- 1938) with its rationalist chapel, the Hygiene and Prophylaxis Laboratory (1933-1938) and the Antituberculosis Dispensary (1933-1938). Elegant and geometrically linear, the Blevio table is rich in design, in details that reveal themselves to the attentive eye. It is the result of a process that removed the superfluous, of the perfect synthesis between form and function, of the careful and selective use of the material that was to become its main aesthetic feature. It is a project that focuses on the essential and on the removal of decoration for decoration’s sake.
