Vintage Plia Folding Chair by Giancarlo Piretti for Castelli, 1970s

Giancarlo Piretti: Bio

Born in Bologna in 1940, Giancarlo Piretti studied at the Instituto Statale d'Arte. He went on to work for Anonima Castelli as an interior designer, creating home furniture, office furnishings and the iconic Plia chair which won him the SMAU prize as well as great critical acclaim. The folding chair has a light frame of chromium plated tubular steel and a seat and back of transparent Lucite. Functional and elegant, the Plia is only 5cm thick when folded and, to complement the wildly popular chair, he created the Plia folding table in 1969 which was similarly well received. For seven years, while he worked for Castelli, he also taught interior design at the Instituto. He is often attributed to changing the way the world thought about Italian design.

Giancarlo Piretti at Castelli

Giancarlo Piretti remained at Castelli for 12 years, and while he worked on many different designs, his innovations were mostly in seating. In the late 1970s he collaborated with Emilio Ambasz on the ergonomic seats Vertebra - an office chair with a flexible back - and Dorsal, another office chair which won numerous awards. Other notable designs by Giancarlo Piretti include the Platone, a folding desk, and Sistema 61 which was a sofa seating system.

The Later Career of Giancarlo Piretti

After moving to Castilia, a subsidiary of Castelli, he revealed The Piretti Collection in Chicago in 1988, which boasted over 50 different office chairs and seating. The notable aspect of the design is the mechanism on the back of the seats that allowed the chairs to be adjusted to the weight of the person sitting in them, and won prizes such as the UBD, the ASID, the Compasso s'Oro and the G-Mark.

Italian design company Castelli began dates from 1877 when Ettore Castelli founded a small workshop in Bologna. In 1939, the firm was renamed Anonima Castelli and began producing modern office furniture for which the brand is best known on the vintage market. It is recognized as one of the foremost manufacturers of Italian design of the 20th century and as the producer of the iconic Plia Chair.

In the 1960s, Giancarlo Piretti (born in Bologna in 1940) joined Castelli as an interior designer. During his twelve years at Castelli, Piretti obtained numerous industrial patents and designed many now iconic models, primarily in seating design. Piretti was instrumental in establishing Castelli’s  international reputation, being the creator of the brand’s most successful and well known designs. Undoubtedly a design classic, Piretti’s plastic folding Plia Chair (1968) was exhibited at the Fiera del Mobile fair in Milan in 1967. The chair, which has sold over four million units since 1969, won the BIO 5 award at the Ljubljana Biennial in 1971, Germany’s Gute Form prize in 1973 and can be found in permanent collections of museums in Austria, Czech Republic, Slovenia, and the United States.

Piretti’s most famous designs for Castelli include the DCS 106 Stacking Chair (1965), Plona Lounge Chair (1969), Alky Chair (c. 1970), Plantone Folding Desk (1970), Plano (1971, Gold Medal IBD), Planto Coat Rack (1972), and the modular System 61 Sofa (1973)

In the late-1970s, Piretti worked with Argentinian architect-designer Emilio Ambasz (b. 1943), and the pair created the two ergonomic seating systems Vertebra (1979, winner of the Smau Industrial Design Award) and Dorsal (1981) for Castelli.

Although Castelli’s legacy is often defined by its partnership with Piretti, the brand has produced work by many other talented designers including Claudio Bellini, Rodolfo Bonetto, Michele De Lucchi, Hans Ell, Doriana and Massimiliano Fuksas, Gino Gamberini, Nilo Gioacchini, Enzo Mari, Charles Pollock, F.A. Porsche, Mario Ruiz, and Richard Sapper. Important designs include Sapper’s Nine to Five Desk (1986, winner of a Compasso d’Oro); Pollock’s Penelope Chair (1982); Porsche’s Executive Office Series (1989); and Ruiz’ K22 Program (2005).

Castelli received four Compasso d’Oro Awards between 1981 and 1991.

In 1992, Castelli became part of the Haworth Group. Today, Castelli specializes in producing environmentally friendly and sustainable products.