When one of the world’s great architects has come home to roost and agreed to create a select product line exclusively for you, then there’s no need to hold back on the aplomb. That’s why AgapeCasa doesn’t hesitate to trot out the hyperbole for Angelo Mangiarotti and his recent Clizia Marble Chair. The marvelous Mangiarotti—renowned architect schooled in the international style by Gropius, van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright; professor of A&D at no less than seven universities in Italy and abroad; author and creator of international landmarks like the Venice underground railroad station and the Fiera del Mare exhibition pavilion; master manipulator of glass, steel, concrete, and marble—is lately in the employ of said manufacturer, who has characterized him thusly: “a razor-sharp exponent of rigorous functionalism, who, however, never lost sight of elegance and beauty, taking his own work to the very verge of sculpture through clever studies of form, always using cutting-edge production processes and materials backed up by proper know-how and, above all, thinking.”

Clizia. Designed by Angelo Mangiarotti.

Carrara Goes Green

Perhaps marble can never be entirely sustainable, but Mangiarotti’s Clizia Chair takes a couple of leaping bounds in the right direction. The design of the piece has a built in doubling, such that as the first chair is sculpted out of a single block of marble, the remnant becomes one as well. This precision relief (remember the old Michelangelo saw about freeing the form imprisoned in the marble) conserves materials while hastening production, thus making Clizia a bigger bang for AgapeCasa’s environmental buck. The key is in Mangiarotti’s sculpted design, in which “the upper edge of the seat coincides with the lower edge so that the monolithic sections are made out of the same block of marble in one single cut performed by numerically controlled machines, simultaneously creating two chairs.”

This is certainly ingenious but, as they say, the proof is in the pudding. Happily, this is Mangiarotti we’re talking about, a man famed for his belief in “the rise of form through the correct use of matter and technique,” so the pudding in this case performs amply. Clizia is an artful fusion of mind and material, an expertly contrived exploration of the synergy between technology and craftsmanship. The sinuous cantilevered chair seems to sing, in fact, of a harmony between what I might call museum-chic and cool contemporaneity.

Clizia is suitable for indoor or outdoor use. Options include white Carrara, grey Carnic or black Marquina marble. The flat base support is made of Corten steel.