Marco Zanuso Large Architectural X-Leg Dining Table in Walnut, Italy 1974

Marco Zanuso (1916-2001)

A large and striking modernist dining table by Marco Zanuso for Poggi, in polished walnut. With architectural double X-legs and a beautiful two-tone top, the pure, strong lines of the design are complimented by the tactile grain of the wood. The result is a minimalism at once taut and sensual: modernism with verve.

A leading designer in Italy’s postwar resurgence, as well as the editor of Gio Ponti’s Domus magazine, Zanuso belonged to a generation dedicated to exploring the new technologies and materials developed during and after World War II. His work epitomized the elegance, practicality and irreverence that made Italy a world style leader. Zanuso’s best industrial design packaged functional ease within a snappy sculptural form: an acrylic clamshell cube that was a portable radio for Brionvega, meant to compete with the Japanese; a stackable children’s chair for Kartell, the first made entirely from injection molded plastic; the iconic and fluid “Lady” armchair, in Pirelli’s new foam rubber, which launched Arflex, their furniture division; a boxy plastic scale for Terraillon that was a kitchen staple in the 1970’s. Even an ambulance which opened to reveal a hidden living room, part of a series of mobile housing units for an exhibition on Italian domestic design at MoMA in 1972.

But Zanuso also worked, far more sparingly but equally inventively, with traditional materials like walnut, deploying the innovative principles of industrial design in service of craft. Here, an 8-foot table of seeming architectural complexity can be disassembled and packed flat by removing a dozen screws, and reassembled by a reasonably dexterous child.

Italy, 1974.