With time, the armchair designed by Alfredo Häberli, Alias wins the prestigious Red Dot Design Award for the third time and confirms its leadership in the world of Made-in-Italy design excellence. The armchair was selected because of its design quality and innovation by an international jury composed of designers, teachers, experts and journalists. The award will be handed over on 22nd June during a ceremony to take place at the Aalto Theatre in Essen. In this manner, time becomes part of the Red Dot Design Museum, where the award winning products have been collected since 1955.

“I have great respect for the Red Dot Design Award, which I find absolutely current in its capacity to promote the culture of design and innovation applied to the project: receiving this prestigious recognition is a great honour for both Alias and Häberli. From the start, time proved a veritable challenge in that the designer’s original idea of transforming a bidimensional form into a 3-D shell by bending it made it necessary to invent a new sheet-like material that was sturdy enough to withstand the weight of a person, flexible enough to be bent into the desired shape, had form memory and an outstanding surface quality requiring no coating. In the process, we also sought the expertise of artisans specialising in snowboard sandwich construction and, after two years of work, this astonishing project came to life, combining the formal elegance of Alfredo’s design and the technological research conducted by the Alias product development team, habitually engaged in exploring new materials and technologies”, explains architect Andrea Sanguineti, Alias brand manager & design director.

Time was born of the gesture that the designer makes in giving shape to a shell characterised by great stylistic balance and unique ergonomic characteristics. The die-cutting process performed on the sheet, which consists of a sandwich of wood and composites, enables the parts to be fitted together seamlessly, and creates a highly ergonomic, enveloping design.  With Time, Häberli experimented with the latest manufacturing techniques and found in Alias the ideal partner to give voice to a new, contemporary language, whereby highly innovative contents can coexist with a strong human component. So, thanks to their quality design, time receives one of the most sought-after and important international design awards, a prize whose aim is to honour the exceptional quality of designers and producers who, since 1955 have been competing for the RED DOT DESIGN AWARD and are celebrated in an annual ceremony in Germany and presented in the Red Dot museum at Zollverein, Essen.