Incollect Magazine - Issue 3

Issue 3 82 www.incollect.com by Benjamin Genocchio S elma Cisic has a story to tell — many stories, actually, beginning with her upbringing in Bosnia- Herzegovina, where she trained as an architect and designer, then traveling with her husband for work to Brazil, where she met a group of modern architects and designers and fell in love with Brazilian modern furniture. She later moved to Los Angeles, opened up her showroom Adesso Imports, and began to import Brazilian design. During her time in Brazil, Cisic met Sérgio Rodrigues (1927–2014), the Rio de Janeiro-born and raised architect who helped transition modernist architecture into sculptural wooden furniture. Today, he is most famous for his Mole armchair, from 1957, which is included in the collection of MOMA in New York. She also became a friend of Jorge Zalszupin (1922–2020), born Jerzy Zalszupin in Warsaw before moving to Bucharest, then Rio de Janeiro in 1949 as part of an influx of immigrants from Italy, Poland, Germany and Portugal, where he joined Rodrigues and formed a loose- knit group of architects, designers and artisans who spearheaded modern Brazilian design as part of a national cultural imperative in the 1950s to become a modern country. The Russian-born architect Oscar Niemeyer was a central figure in this cultural push, epitomized in the development of Brasilia as the planned capital of Brazil, with design as a defining component, similar to the creation of Chandigarh in northern India that was designed in part by Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. Rodrigues, Zalszupin, and others designed furniture for Neimeyer’s buildings in Brazil, and Zalsupin was one of the team of designers who produced modernist furniture for the many buildings for Brazil’s new capital, which took formal inspiration from modern architecture pioneered in Europe by architects Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. “The furniture literally came out of the architecture,” Cisic says. “Both Rodrigues and Zalszupin were architects by training, designing modernist homes for clients in Brazil and couldn’t find modern furnishings and so they ended up designing it themselves.” The industrial and mass manufactured materials being used in mid-century modern furniture elsewhere were then not widely available in Brazil, so the modern forms the Brazilian designers imagined were largely crafted in local natural materials, specifically tropical hardwoods, leather, and cane. Thril Brazi of the How Brazilian Mid-Century Design Soars Above and Beyond Beauty and Function