Disco Divans

Gufram gets its groove on with a collection of soul-powered seating

- Rosa Bertoli

When Gufram owner Charley Vezza first saw the deflated, Dalíesque disco balls created by Dutch artist duo Rotganzen, he knew they would be a perfect addition to the nightclub-inspired collection he was plotting.

Dancing had been on his mind since he found an old catalogue of contract furniture for discotheques in the Gufram archives. Dating from the 1980s, it featured a series of striking modular upholstered pieces. When Vezza showed it to the designers at Milan-based studio Atelier Biagetti, he kickstarted one of his company’s most exciting collaborations to date and a celebration of a particularly innovative space and time for Italian design.

‘There has been a growing interest in the Radical design movement in the past five years, and what it means for us today,’ says Catharine Rossi. A design researcher with a strong focus on the nightclub phenomenon, she is co-curator of a new show at Vitra’s Design Museum (see page 088). ‘There has also been a growing interest in club culture, an area in which these Radical designers were active: the only spaces they actually built were discos,’ she adds. Nightclubs gave them space ‘to experiment and imagine... outside of commercial and corporate constraints’.