Saporiti Italia
The Architecture of the Besnate Headquarters
Founded in 1948 by Sergio Saporiti in Besnate, at the heart of the aerospace industry hub, Saporiti Italia has always been an atypical and highly innovative company in the furniture sector, especially due to its location outside the traditional furniture district (Brianza).
Saporiti Italia’s products have been designed by some of the most famous architects in the world and have been exhibited in prestigious design and art museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, MUKA in Antwerp, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Triennale in Milan, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and many others.
Initially a small artisan workshop, it grew into a larger furniture factory and complete cycle operation, eventually reaching more than 300 employees working in two facilities covering over 20,000 square meters. In the early ’90s, it transformed from a furniture factory into a provider of custom furnishings for large and small turnkey interior projects, known in the furniture industry as “Contract Projects”.
The current headquarters of Saporiti Italia, designed by architect Vittorio Introini at the end of the 1960s and inaugurated in 1970, was one of the factories of Saporiti Italia until the mid-1990s. Now, it is the “Saporiti Italia Hub”: the meeting, research, design, and organizational center for all of Saporiti Italia’s global activities.
This structure is an architecturally and constructively interesting project. Architecturally, it integrates the industrial complex with the surrounding landscape. The “stepped” structure of the building creates a unique architectural continuity between the inside and outside.
From a construction perspective, it features advanced characteristics for its time, still innovative today. It is a concrete structure with wide spans and a series of innovative fiberglass “shells” on the facades and roof that fill the work environment with natural light.
Today, Saporiti Italia is no longer a “Furniture Factory” but a “Design Management Company” that creates, organizes, and executes complex design projects. Many large and small international companies have adopted this modern approach in recent years, where design, organization, and services offered to clients are far more important than the simple product.
In 2005, the interiors were completely redesigned by Barcelona designer Martì Guixé to accommodate the transformation from a factory to a Hub/Research Center. The large central interior space is designed as a showroom that tells both the history—products, projects, materials—and the future—know-how, solutions, technical and design experimentation—of Saporiti Italia.
