Cini Boeri

One of the most influential architects and designers on the post-WWII Italian scene, Maria Cristina Mariani Dameno, known as "Cini", a diminutive deriving from the Lombard "piccinina" (meaning little one), was born in Milan in 1924. In 1951, she obtained her degree in architecture at the Milan Polytechnic and began a challenging apprenticeship in an exclusively male-oriented profession. Cini Boeri did not give up her career after her marriage to neurosurgeon Renato Boeri. She worked for the master Gio Ponti and later for Philco, where she sold the American company's modular kitchens. This led to her encounter with Marco Zanuso at the Salone del Mobile in 1952 marking the beginning of her extraordinary success in the world of design and architecture. She worked in the Zanuso studio for about 12 years alongside Aldo Rossi and Richard Sapper, tackling her first significant architectural projects. Boeri was introduced to the contemporary milieu of artists and writers, including Lucio Fontana and Ernesto Nathan Rogers.

In 1963, she opened her own office. Her first client was Arflex, with which she won the Compasso d'Oro ADI in 1979 for the sofa Strips, a revolutionary seating system. Her experimental approach led her to explore new languages and use materials in innovative ways. In Boeri's work, function and the relationship with the user are priorities over form. In her long career, she designed single-family homes and apartment and office interiors. She also designed showrooms - for Knoll International in France, Germany, Italy and California, the Venini store in Piazza San Marco in Venice, and exhibitions and museums. She also held lectures and conferences at many universities, disseminating her work and thinking in numerous published texts.

In the field of product design, many objects result from her long collaboration with Arflex. Alongside the Strips sofa are the Bobo Lounge chair (1967); the innovative Serpentone, a sofa sold by the metre (1971); the armchairs in the Pecorelle collection (1972); the Bengodi sofa (1974), reinterpreted in 2009 with the name Ben Ben. She collaborated with other brands, including Knoll, for which she designed the Cini Boeri Collection of chairs and the Lunario collection of tables. In 1987, she created one of the most iconic pieces of Italian design for Fiam Italia - the entirely glass Ghost armchair. Many Cini Boeri-designed objects are now on display in the permanent collections of MoMA in New York, MAD in Paris and the Design Museum at the Triennale in Milan. In addition to the Compasso d'Oro ADI, she received the 2008 Chicago Good Design Award, the honour of Grande Ufficiale dell'Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana and the Compasso d'Oro for her career in 2011.
Cini Boeri died in Milan at the age of 96, on September 9, 2020.

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