MOKA chair
From the Bar Moka of 1939 to its re-edition in an outdoor version in 2019, the iconic chair designed by Mario Asnago and Claudio Vender has sailed through 8 decades with its inimitable charm intact.
Nowadays, there’s a lot of buzz about retail design, a branch of interior design focused on retail spaces.
Mario Asnago and Claudio Vender can rightfully be considered the forerunners of this concept, thanks to their renovation of the Società Lombarda Moka Efti bar, which opened in Milan’s via Tommaso Grossi in November 1939, “to resounding public acclaim and the most flattering praise and admiration... this is the first truly new bar to rise in our city and is so striking as to merit an award”, reported an article published in the “La Sera” daily.
For the first time ever, Asnago and Vender design an all-metal chair, featuring an X-shaped backrest whose almost ‘metaphysical’ skeleton expresses sleek, uncluttered simplicity. This project marks the evolution of an on-going quest. A quest that reaches full maturity in this plan for a space that, with its furnishings, formalizes a vision of place with new canons of beauty and comfort, achieved through a feeling of spaciousness and light that become the determining elements in the quintessential quality of the room.
“The X-shaped backrests of their chairs visually construct a system of transparent planes that enlivens the space and lends it a feeling of depth.” (Airoldi 1986)
In 1985, Flexform decided to add this extraordinary designer product to its collection, convinced that the pure, uncomplicated design of the Moka chair would place it among the products sure to remain untouched by the passage of time and fashions.
The Moka chair has now been adapted in a completely contemporary outdoor version. The striking modernity of the original design, dense with references to the rationalist movement, is now interpreted in innovative materials chosen for their outstanding weather-resistant qualities.
