OSVALDO BORSANI

Osvaldo Borsani was born in Varedo in 1911 as the son of Gaetano, an established furniture manufacturer. In the family business, “Atelier di Varedo”, sixteen-year-old Osvaldo received his first training.

At the time it was the architect Maggioni who designed new furniture for the Atelier, inspired by Vienna, a city where architects, painters, sculptors, weavers and graphic designers worked side by side, determining the aesthetic of the Jugendstil. The influence of arts and crafts and the Jugendstil turned out to be important for the young Borsani’s later design physiognomy. It is no coincidence that his training began with the artistic maturity at the Academy of Fine Arts, followed by the Milan Polytechnic where, in 1937, he graduated in architecture. During his student career he developed an irrepressible vocation for everything that was avant-garde, or related to technology and innovation. The term designer, perhaps due to the trivialization it has undergone over the years, has always been close to Osvaldo Borsani. On the occasion of an interview with Ottagono magazine in 1973, he stated:

“When we used the word ‘design', we did it with profound respect because a new way of thinking and building was named: it was a word that only us, the experts while we were trying, moving in a deaf and difficult context, to explain, introduce, divulge the methods of design applied to industry. Today we no longer use this word, it is so vulgarized, so it is used purposefully and inappropriately, that sometimes we are suspicious. We are not made to work in the understanding and in the acquired, we look for new ways and therefore to name new things new words are needed “.

Borsani therefore considered himself primarily a designer whatever the scale of his intervention: a building, an industrial product, the integrated design of an environment, or a piece of furniture. In 1953, together with his brother Fulgenzio, he created his most complex project, Tecno: a company idea that took its name from the Greek 'techne' which means both art and technique. A programmatic name, chosen to underline the technological quality of the project, without renouncing the extraordinary heritage of craftsmanship in the treatment of materials, in the attention to detail, in the interpretation of the shape. Tecno was first and foremost an entrepreneur's project: Italy had begun its outsourcing process; the office environment did not yet have an indisputable formal definition of its own, and that is where Osvaldo Borsani wanted to arrive: to reinvent the work spaces, a mix of formal elegance, rigour, and rational functionality that the modern movement had developed for domestic living. The projects born under Tecno became widely successful thanks to their innovative language and quality. They became real references for the history of Italian design present in museum collections all over the world.

In 1956, the Milanese shop in Via Montenapoleone 27 was established and within a few years the “red T” brand showed itself in the most prestigious streets of Italian cities and European capitals. Tecno meant entering a mixture of words: the name could be submerged in many similar names. Over the decades, the brothers had been committed to making their company strong and filling it with meaning. Osvaldo created Tecno design: rigour of form, quality of materials and workmanship, attention to the opportunities of technology and the maturing of needs. Thanks to the Borsani brothers’ philosophy of quality, in the great crossroads of the design culture “Tecno was simply Tecno”. They won the challenge set many years ago, their name was not confused with anyone else's. During Borsani’s career from the 1930s until 1985, unique pieces were born from furniture icons to interiors, alongside an incredibly rich array of architecture designs. ~H.