Electaarchitettura is publishing the first monograph devoted to the history of the Pavia-based firm, accompanied by a complete list of the furnishings produced. The professional achievement of the furniture manufacturer Roberto Poggi (1924) is both exemplary and atypical. Together with his brother Ezio he transformed the craft skills of his father Carlo, founder of the Poggi homonymous carpentry workshop in Pavia, into a production of innovative furnishings in which is possible to read both the legacy of the Lombard manufacturing tradition and the inspiration from the post-war Milanese architectural and artistic culture.

Starting in the late 1940s, a thirty-year partnership with Franco Albini testifies to Poggi’s ability to share and refine the architect’s methodological approach and expressive tension, enhancing them in elegant serial furnishings destined to become unmistakable icons of Italian design.

The obsessive attention to detail, joinery, materials and the placing of the wood grain in relation to the most severe structural efforts have been common to Poggi’s products from his beginnings and through all his activity, appearing intact in the furnishings made or only designed by Corrado Levi and Laura Petrazzini, Umberto Riva, Renzo Piano, Ugo La Pietra, Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Achille Castiglioni, Marco Zanuso and Vico Magistretti: only a few of the many architects who found much more than a producer in Pavia.