Tobia and Afra Scarpa’s design work knew no bounds. The duo crafted cookware, architecture, interior design, furniture, clothing and art glass in a 1960s Italy that increasingly saw pop culture as a rebellious alternative to the elegance and sophistication of the older generation of Italian designers.¹Roberto Masiero, Afra e Tobia Scarpa: architetture, Electa, Milan, 1996, p. 7. An older generation that included Tobia’s father, the famed Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, whose body of work was heavily influenced by his Venetian heritage. Carlo’s Dish, 1960, presented to the NGV through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Mr Klaus Moje, Fellow, is in fact manufactured by the Murano glassware company Venini & Co, located on the Venetian Murano islands. A canoe-shaped dish, its ovoid, ultramarine-blue elements are fused within a dark matrix which, in transmitted light, appear as a deep, claret wine colour. Almost two decades after the dish’s creation, Carlo would be buried next to his final project, the Brion Tomb, 1968–78, near Treviso, Italy, after falling down a set of concrete stairs in Japan.

Tobia was forty-three at the time of his father’s death. He, too, had briefly worked with Venini & Co., designing works like Bowl, 1958 (donated to the NGV Collection by the Bequest of Erwin and Anne Marie Herzenberg), before setting up his own design studio with wife Afra (nee Bianchin) in her hometown of Montebelluna in 1960. Both attended the Università Iuav di Venezia, graduating with architectural degrees and, as the story goes, falling in love between the desks as the Neo-Rationalist architect, designer and university instructor Franco Albini held sway in a lecture on decoration.²Alessia Musillo, ‘A look at the (private) lives of Tobia and Afra Scarpa, brilliant minds in golden decades of design’, Elle Decor, 5 Mar. 2021, , accessed 28 Nov. 2023. By 1969, both had graduated from the Venice Institute of Architecture. Less than a year later, the duo would win the Compasso d’Oro, an Italian industrial design award, for the Soriana armchair, 1968 (MoMA, New York). Designed for Italian manufacturing company Cassina, for which their former instructor (and possible matchmaker) Albini had often designed, the Soriana was praised by the jury for the ‘complexity of the image achieved with construction and [for its] technical means of remarkable simplicity and consistency’.³ ‘Soriana by Afra and Tobia Scarpa for Cassina’, Italian Design Club, accessed 28 Nov. 2023.

Afra and Tobia were by no means the only husband and wife designers working together in postwar Italy. Fellow northerners Giulio Castelli and Anna Castelli Ferrieri founded Kartell in Milan in 1949. Castelli Ferrieri only started working with her husband at the furniture design company after two of his business partners had left. She did so reluctantly, ‘as [she] was convinced … that you should never work with your husband’.⁴ Catharine Rossi, ‘Furniture, feminism and the feminine: women designers in post-war Italy, 1945 to 1970’, Journal of Design History, vol. 22, no. 3, Sep. 2009, pp. 243–57. While Afra never publicly expressed similar reservations, she was aware, as her daughter Carlotta explained in an interview in 2022, that she lived and worked in Tobia’s shadow.⁵ Silvia Burini, ‘Afra Bianchin Scarpa: lasciare il segno’ (PhD thesis, Universita Ca’Foscari Venezia), 2022, p. 134, accessed 28 Nov. 2023.

Tobia was born with art ‘in his lungs’ in his childhood home on rio Marin in Venice. He was often described as the creative, with pencil in hand, while Afra, the daughter of petite bourgeoisie in the Treviso countryside, was portrayed managing clients, tempering Tobia’s creativity and commenting on the feasibility of his designs. In an interview with photographer Alessandra Chemollo in 2022, Afra is described as speaking in dialect and defying the ‘feminine standards of her time’, dressing finto trasandato (in a pretend scruffiness), while Tobia was a ‘vain and always handsome man’.⁶ ibid. p. 132. She worried that without Tobia there would be no Afra.⁷Martino Sorteni, Corrado Stajano (ed.), Afra e Tobia Scarpa: il designer, in La mia professione, Roma-BariLaterza & Figli, 1986, pp. 315–16.

Throughout their partnership, Afra and Tobia would complete more than four hundred works together,⁸Enzo Favero, ‘Addio ad Afra Scarpa, designer alter ego di Tobia’, Il mattino di Padova, 31 July 2011, accessed 28 Nov. 2023. with Afra being as central to their design and realisation as her husband. The Coronado sofa, designed for the Como furniture company B. & B. Italia in 1966, is just one example of this. Its innovative steel frame and preformed cold-pressed polyurethane padding could be produced quickly and economically, an approach inspired by the bicycles manufactured in Casimiro Bianchin (Afra’s father)’s shop.⁹ Masiero, p. 2. And yet, as Carlotta explains, Afra demurred the spotlight, preferring to say she simply cared for the casa e botega (house and shop) as her mother and grandmother did before her:

Afra was a professionista (professional). She knew how to design a project, she knew how to design anything on her own, but she never did, unlike Tobia who had no qualms about solo designing a wine label, a piece of cutlery or a vase.⁹ Burini, p. 132.

The pair separated in the early 2000s, following the death of their youngest son, Niccolò, in a car accident in 1997. Their oldest child, Sebastiano, had also died in a car accident in 1979, just a year after Niccolò’s birth. Nozomi Shinoda, who worked with Afra and Tobia from the 1990s until the end of their partnership, said in 2022 of Niccolò’s death, ‘Tobia wanted to forget and continue living, to forget what happened. Afra was a mother and didn’t want to work anymore’.¹¹ ibid, p. 142.

Tobia remarried in 2008, the same year he received the career Compasso d’Oro award, in his name alone. In an interview with journalist Renzo Zorzi, he would credit Afra with giving him the strength to cut the ombelico (umbilical cord) and design freely without the weight of being Carlo Scarpa’s son.¹² Renzo Zorzi, ‘Intervista a Tobia Scarpa’, Zodiac, no. 20, 1970, p. 77.Aged eighty-eight, he still works from his studio in Venice today. Afra retired as an architect and designer after Niccolò’s death. She died aged seventy-four in 2011.

But long before the loss of their sons and subsequent separation, Tobia and Afra designed a work you can find in the NGV Collection today. The Artona chair, 1975, presented to the Gallery in 1976 by B. & B. Italia (Maxalto) & Design 250 Pty Ltd, was part of the first collection produced by Maxalto, a special division of B. & B. Italia. The name derives from the Venetian dialect terms massa alto, which mean ‘the highest’, and Afra and Tobia were its inaugural collaborators.¹³ ‘Maxalto a success story’, Maxalto, accessed 28 Nov. 2023. They sought to revitalise classical styles and looked to ancient production processes typical of cabinet and lute making to inform their first collection.¹⁴ ibid. The result was extremely striking in its sculptural effect, as epitomised by the Artona chair, also sometimes known as the Africa chair, which is carved from walnut and inlaid with dark lines of ebony before being finished with a black leather seat.

There is something poetic in the fact that of all the works by Afra and Tobia Scarpa the NGV could hold in its collection, it would be a chair. In 1959, the duo, still students, worked on their very first project together. A chair. The Pigreco chair, to be precise, which would reach far beyond Franco Albini’s decoration course, for which it was designed, and catapult the young couple on the road to becoming icons of the postwar Italian design industry.

Tobia dubbed the Pigreco their portafortuna (lucky charm).¹⁵ Sorteni, p. 299. Writer Roberto Masiero, in the catalogue for the exhibition Nel mondo di Afra e Tobia Scarpa in 1992–93 was less superstitious, writing ‘it was the beginning and everything was already “understood” [by Afra and Tobia]: measurement, precision, control of production techniques and shape, functionality. It’s hard to believe it was their very first work together.’¹⁶ Masiero, p. 2.

Elisa Scarton is NGV Senior Editorial Coordinator.

This article was first published in the Jan–Feb 2024 issue of NGV Magazine.