The Quaderna collection – designed by Superstudio from 1969 to 1972, manufactured by Zanotta from 1972 and recognized as Radical Design manifesto collection – expands with the addition of three brand new products that widen the functionality and product types covered by the checkered furniture range: the mirror, the low storage unit for living room and one cupboard.
The Quaderna mirror is inspired by the 'Measuring Mirror' sculpture module that the group's architects used to study the effect of the continuous and potentially infinite super surface. A 5 mm thick plate glass is perimetrically contained by a 51x15x195 cm frame in white Print laminate wood, digitally printed with black squares at 3 cm spac-ing. The mirror is floorstanding and fastened to the wall.
The products in the Quaderna Series are the result of a highly industrialised process and - at the same time - impeccable craftsmanship skills. The chequered laminate was purpose-created by Print based on a design by Superstudio and features an isotropic chequered design with a 3 cm centre distance. The mesh is produced using digital printing that causes a slight variation in the centre distance of the lines and thus means it is necessary to create a body to cover that is not perfectly orthogonal in order to make all the lines on each side line up optically. The laminate pieces are individually applied in a specific sequence. This manual task requires extreme artisanal precision and uses the inlaying technique which takes many hours of work to produce a single item of furniture. Every Quaderna object comes from a single sheet of laminate so that the centre distance is the same, albeit slightly misaligned by a few tenths of a centimetre: this is the only way the chequered surfaces prove continuous in the three dimensions guided by the Cartesian axes in keeping with the original project. The convergence of the lines of the mesh determines the total homogeneity of the surfaces and lends the furniture a strong personality, as they are visually marked in their corners. The difficulty in ensuring all the joints line up to the nearest millimetre makes it impossible to detach the legs from the tabletop even during transport. An additional complexity, however an essential one to preserve the uniqueness of the original idea.
