Gianfranco Frattini was born in Padua in 1926 and graduated in architecture from the Milan Polytechnic in 1953. He joined Gio Ponti's studio soon after, and began working with Cesare Cassina the following year, at the moment Italian manufacturing was learning how to put good design into production.
He was a founder of the ADI, the Italian industrial design association, and helped run the Triennale di Milano. He designed for Bernini, Knoll and Artemide among others, and with Livio Castiglioni drew the Boalum lamp, a flexible tube of light that behaved like no lamp before it. He worked as readily on interiors as on furniture, and shaped some of the best known rooms in Milan.
Wood was his material. The Albero bookcase, a revolving column of shelves first drawn in the 1950s and now made by Poltrona Frau, is the clearest statement of it. He won several Compasso d'Oro awards, and his work is held in design museums internationally. He died in Milan in 2004.
