Saratoga 60 

Capsule
2024

On Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue, at 54th Street, there is a room of holy chairs. Designed in 1977 by the late Lella and Massimo Vignelli—Italian design titans who studied architecture at the University of Venice, before marrying, moving to the US, and eventually launching Vignelli Associates (1971–2014)—the chairs, or pews, are made from common butcher-block.

There is something monastic about them, or maybe Kardashian-mansion-cum-white-cube-gallery: pale and blonde and unadorned, with tall, rigid backs. The seat of each pew is shallow, forcing the sitter bolt upright and awake. A firm padding on the backs provides the requisite comfort to sit through a service—nothing more. Unlike the pews of most churches across America, they are designed to move, with seven possible configurations. (A special dolly allows two people to complete the task.) Each time the angular pews realign, the entire room is new. As for their longevity, in 1978, Massimo told The New York Times that they’d last 100 years: “What can be sturdier than the wood that takes a butcher’s beating daily?”

The Vignelli pews were commissioned by Saint Peter’s, a Lutheran church, along with a pulpit and other interior furnishings. While their origins may appear puritanical, they’re quite the opposite; the promise of pleasure and unmoving rules often collided in the couple’s practice. (Writing for Eye, critic Rick Poyner once linked their strictly modernist design to a “highly cultivated bloom, pruned into discipline.”) The Saint Peter’s pews are actually a stripped-back take on an earlier, more lustrous Vignelli sofa, the Saratoga, oozing gloss and sex. This year, it turns 60 years old.

When the Saratoga collection debuted in 1964, it was one of Lella and Massimo’s first furniture commissions. Later, they’d conceive other quietly radical silhouettes: stacking chairs whose reinforced plastic rippled like handkerchiefs; tables for Casigliani, involving glass slabs propped up with slanting Pisa blocks; an executive desk for Bernini that offered the sitter two positions—one for solo work, another for meetings—its glass top mirroring a grand piano’s curves. “The most remarkable thing is their consistency,” Deyan Sudjic, the former director of the Design Museum in London, told New York Magazine in 2007. “There’s no sense of the passage of time.” In the same feature, Lella remarked on the endurance of good design: “If you do it right, it will last forever.”

Commissioned by Poltronova, an ambitious Italian design company whose art director was Ettore Sottsass, the Saratoga series was slick and sensuous and seating-forward. There was a squared-off armchair; two, three, and four-seater sofas; a squat, lacquered table and cabinet. The sofas are easily the hero. Alone, they are sublime. Like much of Vignelli’s output, be it furniture, silverware, jewelry, or information systems, they harness a few deceivingly simple elements: a limited, mostly monochrome palette; a handful of hardworking materials; and basic geometric forms.

At first glance, the sofa seems made of only two parts. There is a shiny exterior shell, shaped like a supersized Tetris block, gleaming like tinted office windows. Forming the sofa’s base, arms, and back, it’s made from a wooden-box frame submerged in black or white reflective polyester lacquer. While this shell looks to be a singular form, it is actually assembled with four sections of equal thickness. 

The second element, plump leather cushions—filled with down and sold in tan-toned orange, black, gray, or white—are supported by springs that run along the shell’s base. Pushed tight against each other, the cushions protrude over the sofa’s edges, disrupting its clean horizontal lines. In artist texts for Saratoga, Massimo likened their soft, fine grain to the upholstery of luxury automobiles. Like car seats, Saratoga cocoons the human body, but looks to be rendered by something nonhuman; it is perfectly smooth and stuffed.

“Tension within the context of design invites us to form an opinion, leaving no room for ambivalence,” says David Eardley, a design critic and the founder of New York/Mexico City studio Pink Essay. “This is especially true for a sofa like Saratoga, which offers up a straightforward this or that: soft or hard, lacquer or leather, and, often, two contrasting colors. Does the combination pull us in, or do we find ourselves drawn to one end of its spectrums?” Eardley is partial to the collision, to a Saratoga that’s fully inhaled, in all its indulgent two-facedness. “It allows a simple silhouette to elevate into something more complex,” he says. “The sum is greater than the sofa parts.”

Michael Scanlon, Head of Creative at Chandelier Creative—a New York advertising agency—has long lusted for a Saratoga of his own. He likens it to “mid-century graphic design as furniture,” and notes the hard borders present one of few scenarios in which he’d consent to be boxed in. “I always perk up when one turns up at auction, but my boyfriend enforces a strict no vintage sofas policy,” Scanlon says. “If he can’t test it for comfort, we can’t have it—so the Saratoga will continue to be a fantasy of function.”

By “fantasy of function,” Scanlon is referring to the idea that a sofa, this sofa, could cosplay as another furnishing simultaneously: a coffee or side table, a plinth, a provocative ledge for guests or lovers or possessions to perch upon—this added utility is rather attractive considering the average-sized New York apartment. “The lacquered casing feels so sleek, so 70s, so hedonistic ... and yet it’s functional,” Scanlon says. “Those arms aren’t for resting; they’re for storing things: an ashtray, a drink. I find something quite beautiful and indulgent in that. It’s practical, but not in the expected way that a sofa’s arms and back are.” He conjures fantasy tableaus upon its flat, reflective surface: muscular arms clutching a martini, a seltzer and Chapstick sitting close on quiet evenings. For Scanlon, Saratoga’s slick, light-catching structure elevates the seat to a cinephilic realm. It is made for the theater of the home. 

In Vignelli: From A–Z (2007), Massimo reflects on Saratoga’s sculptural presence. He and Lella wanted these pieces to exist freely in open space—like their pews would, years later. Instead of being relegated to a room’s perimeters, they imagined their sofa as a center-piece, a divider, causing people to move and interact in new ways. Their logic ran counter to decorous tastes of the early 1960s, where “a centrifugal force ... spattered furniture on the walls.”

Massimo also hoped the sofa’s outer shell would be cut from Belgian marble—resulting in something more hulking and grandiose. Luckily, that proved unfeasible. In Vignelli: From A–Z, he hints that the wet-look lacquer was Lella’s genius. Until Saratoga, lacquer was largely out of vogue, relegated to kitchen furniture, or the re-discovered panel works of Irish architect Eileen Gray. Massimo and Lella’s “strongest disagreements’’ tended to happen during prototyping, when testing out a design’s feasibility, ie. if a mostly marble sofa would actually work. “Lella, the voice of reason, wants to correct the product so that it will work,” Massimo wrote. “I, the voice of dreams, want to stretch reality to conform to the original idea, at the risk of feasibility. This ... is part of our process, but it is also a necessary step to obtain the best results.”

Dreaming up furnishings with Italian companies like Poltronova enabled Lella and Massimo to work with a fluidity not always possible in the US, where there was more financial pressure, stricter timelines, rigid marketing agendas. And while the expatriate couple were celebrated in New York—their color-coded signage still covers the subway system, and their alphabet loops across Bloomingdale’s brown shopping bags—their polymathic approach didn’t always trans- late. In New York, most architects were strictly architects. The Vignellis did not really even design buildings—they designed everything that lives within them.

Lella’s role in their practice—perhaps unsurprisingly, infuriatingly—was routinely minimized in her lifetime. (Lella passed away in 2016; Massimo, in 2014.) In DESIGN: VIGNELLI, a lush Rizzoli tome, their firm’s former vice president of design, Beatriz Cifuentes-Caballero, recalls Massimo throwing away invitations addressed only to him. Lella was, Cifuentes-Caballero explains, a very serious woman. Together, they were twin visionaries. “Their design philosophies were the same,” she says, “almost one.”