Gianni Pettena

Gianni Pettena, born in Bolzano in 1940, graduated in architecture in Florence in 1968 and belonged to the original core of Italy’s Radical architecture. As an artist in residence in the United States he conceived Ice House, a plan to cover a Minneapolis school in ice, and from 1973 to 2008 he taught contemporary architectural history in Florence. The Canadian Centre for Architecture holds his archive.

Poltronova now produces Rumble, the sofa he designed in 1967 while living in a vast nineteenth-century atelier, where furniture had to match the scale of the space rather than the human body.