Detecma chair | Tullio Regge | Gufram, Italy | 1970

Tullio Regge was born July 11, 1931 in Turin, Italy.  He obtained a degree in physics from the University of Turin in 1952 and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Rochester in 1957. From 1958 to 1959 Regge held a post at the Max Planck Institute for Physics where he worked with Werner Heisenberg. In 1961 he was appointed to chair of Relativity at the University of Turin. He held an appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1965 to 1979. At present he is emeritus professor at the Polytechnic University of Turin.  He is a highly decorated and regarded theoretical physicist.  He received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics in 1964, the Citt di Como prize in 1968, the Albert Einstein Award in 1979, and the Cecil Powell Medal in 1987.

Tullio Regge also designed a chair.  A really cool chair:

At the end of 1970 a Turin-based company asked me to design a chair. I chose a form of absolutely pure mathematics…Dupin’s Cyclide.  The chair was not marketed properly and has now disappeared from the market.

Left: From From Design to Design, a page from Analytic Geometry by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen, the book used by Tullio Regge. Right: A computer generated Dupin’s cyclide from Wikipedia.  For more information about the mathematics of the cyclide, click here.

The Detecma chair, production ca. 1977.  Image source:  From Design to Design.

Two Detecma chairs.  Image source:  Furniture Fashion.

Detecma chair from the La Triennale di Milano Design Museum.  Image source.

The Detecma miniature model from p. 90 of Modern Equipment galerie ulrich fiedler.  There’s not a whole lot of plastic in the exhibition catalog, but there is a lot of great design.  Click the cover below for a copy.

References

Retrieved May 9, 2011 from http://www.torinoscienza.it/dossier/dal_disegno_al_design_2289

Retrieved May 9, 2011 from http://www.globalarchitectsguide.com/library/Tullio-Regge.php

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