In an interview released in 1973: “When we used the word” design “we did it with profound respect because it named a new way of thinking and building: it was a word that only us, the insiders used while we tried, moving in a deaf and difficult context, to explain, introduce, divulge the methods of design applied to industry ».

Despite this, the term designer has always been a bit narrow for Osvaldo Borsani. Trained in the early 1900s in Varedo, in the province of Monza, in his father Gaetano’s atelier, he had had the opportunity to work alongside the architect Gino Maggioni. Maggioni’s attention to the “contamination of arts and crafts”, derived from the Viennese Jugendstil movement of the early twentieth century, had a significant influence on him.

Hence the vision of Borsani “Integrated Project“. Hence the idea that the secret of a good project lies in the contamination between different disciplines and in the constant search for novelty and modernity. Hence the birth of important collaborations with artists and decorators, such as Roberto Crippa, Arnaldo and Giò Pomodoro, Aligi Sassu, Agenore Fabbri, Fausto Melotti, Andrea Cascella and Lucio Fontana. The association with the latter is particularly significant and intense.
Thanks to Borsani, ABV (Arredamenti Borsani Varedo) is renewed: the lines of the furniture are becoming more and more geometric and essential and his projects are increasingly requested by the Milanese bourgeoisie of the 1940s and 1950s. From now on, it will never stop.