Zanotta

Castiglioni objects between 1951 and 1971 are eleven domestic pieces — most of them still in production at Flos and Zanotta — that argued the readymade and the catalogue object could share a shelf without either losing its citizenship. The line begins in 1951 with Achille Castiglioni and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni drawing a linear fluorescent task lamp called Tubino for a Milanese lighting workshop that would soon be reorganised as Flos. It closes in 1971 with Achille and Pio Manzù tensioning a single steel cable between floor and ceiling, hanging a sliding bracket spotlight off it, and calling it Parentesi. In the twenty years between those two cables — a fluorescent tube and a steel tension wire — the brothers proposed that the household object could be assembled out of tractor seats, bicycle saddles, car headlamps and Carrara marble cylinders without ceasing to be furniture. ...

The carlo mollino zanotta archive deal is now public, dated, and contractually shaped. On 15 April 2026, Italy’s Agenzia del Demanio — the state property agency that manages Carlo Mollino’s artistic heritage on behalf of the Italian State — announced the outcome of a public tender awarding Zanotta the exclusive industrial-design licence on a selected group of 30 Mollino projects, sourced from drawings held in the Fondo Carlo Mollino at the Politecnico di Torino. The licence runs through 2043. Seven of the 30 designs were already in Zanotta’s catalogue under earlier tribute editions; the other 23 have not been reissued since their original mid-century versions. The first to enter serial production is the 1950 Vertebra table, unveiled at Zanotta’s Milan flagship during Milan Design Week 2026. ...

On 11 May 2026, Domus confirmed that Zanotta had been granted an exclusive licence to manufacture 30 Carlo Mollino designs, awarded by Italy’s Agenzia del Demanio via public tender — the year’s most consequential entry in a wider wave of mid-century archive revivals that runs from Cassina’s Le Corbusier Inédits at Salone del Mobile 2026 back through the same company’s 1965 LC Series, sideways into Pierre Jeanneret’s Chandigarh furniture, and out to the $33.5M Claude Lalanne mirror suite auctioned at Sotheby’s New York three weeks earlier. The Mollino licence closes a circuit that the Cassina template opened in 1964. ...