Columbus Biography
Columbus is a company founded by the Milanese industrialist Angelo Luigi Colombo, specialized in the production of metal tubes for multiple uses, such as the construction of airplanes or bicycle frames. In the early 1930s it was a company without a factory, which relied on specialized and competent producers in metalworking, such as the Swiss Embru of Rüti. Following the recommendation of the Bahaus architect and designer Marcel Breuer, Angelo Luigi Colombo will sign an agreement for the exclusive license, with his Columbus brand, of furniture by Breuer and other architects of the Bauhaus and the Swiss-German school. Columbus creates its "original" mobile license with the specialist competence and quality in the processing of the steel tube but also of its curvatures, the result of a process that is both mechanical and manual executive expertise, unlike many furniture makers who in the same years they will combine the wood termination with that of the "fashionable" metal tube, frequently with modest results. The architect Giuseppe Terragni - and before him Giuseppe Pagano, among other things for the design of a very popular umbrella stand - turned to Columbus for the metal tube furnishings of the Como buildings of the second half of the 1930s, such as the Casa del Fascio or the Sant'Elia nursery school. Armchair and chair, with the characteristic elastic cantilever, adopted in both architectures, were produced in small "industrial" series. Among Italian designers, another prestigious collaboration of Columbus was with Piero Bottoni, on the occasion of the VI Milan Triennale in 1936, where different solutions for armchairs based on an original intersection were tested for the waiting room of a dentist's office elastic that for the first time adopted Pirelli Gommapiuma, destined to re-establish the production of upholstered furniture in Italy after the Second World War, starting with the Lady by Marco Zanuso for Arflex.
