Alias gets pride of place at Le Mobile d'Architectes 1960/2020 with Mario Botta's iconic chair seconda and laleggera by Riccardo Blumer

Alias, Italian design brand par excellence, celebrates its 40th anniversary with a rich calendar of cultural rendezvous, including one in Paris, where it will display its creations at Le Mobiler d’Architectes 1960/2020, an exhibition open until 30 September at the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine (Architecture and Heritage City). By showcasing collections of furnishing elements, lamps and objects designed by the best known architects over the last sixty years, the exhibition narrates the masters’ experience with decorative arts as a process of creative cross-fertilisation that translates the shapes of imposing architectural works to small scale proportions. Blending perfectly into this context is seconda, the chair designed for Alias by Mario Botta. Seconda is a small architectural work that echoes the language of the buildings created by the renowned Swiss architect: pure geometric volumes cut with extreme precision, perforated sheet steel surfaces, monumental clefts, all combine in a marvellous interplay of contrasts to conjure up a virtually empty space, a volume with an abstract quality to it, where to make oneself comfortable.  Laleggera chairs the expression of research and technology at its maximum. The result of combining a solid traditional material, solid wood, with the lightest, expanded polyurethane, with a filled structure. A simple and essential symbol. This practical, resistant and stacking chair combines visual and structural lightness. Seconda and laleggera are two icons of Italian design, exemplaries embodiment of the brand’s approach to design. With Alias, in fact, creativity and leading-edge technological research join forces to generate free interpretations of todays’ living environment.  Like the other 300 design pieces on display in Paris, Alias’s chairsinteract with the spaces of the world’s largest architectural centre, starting off an unprecedented dialogue between design creations and the permanent collections of the museum.