SÉRGIO RODRIGUES

Sergio Rodrigues (1927-2014) was born in Brazil and after graduating in 1952 from the Faculdade Nacional de Arquitetura, he assisted in opening, in partnership with the Hauner brothers, Moveis Artesanal Paranaense, the first modern art and furniture store in Curitiba in Brazil. Even though the store attracted a lot of interest, it was a commercial failure.

In 1955, Rodrigues founded Oca, one of the most influential and largest furniture manufacturers ever in Brazil, a store that heralded a new phase in the production of Brazilian furniture. During the peak of his career in the 1950s and 60s, he created furniture designs in accordance with modernism, bringing the Brazilian identity into his projects, both in the design and in the form of traditional materials – leather, wood and rattan – exalting his native culture. He left the company in 1968 and since then has been working in his studio developing furniture lines for industrial production, architecture projects, and hotel, residential and office environments, as well as systems of pre-fabricated homes.

Rodrigues made his mark on the international design scene as the creator of the Mole armchair (1957) lounge chair, which was awarded first prize at the International Furniture Competition in Cantu, Italy (1961) where it was lauded for being unmistakably Brazilian in material, scale and attitude. The Mole armchair is also part of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) collection in New York and is coveted to this day. His designs appear as ambassadors of Brazilian design in architectural projects worldwide such as the Brazilian Embassy in Rome as well as many interiors of Oscar Niemeyer’s buildings in Brasilia. He broke away from paradigms to invent his own language in search of the Brazilian identity and harmoniously integrated the three areas in which he militated: architecture, design, and drawing.