“I believe the sofa is today one of the most meaningful objects on the domestic scene, which is about the sacredness of life. The sofa relates to the cultural aspects of living: conversation, loving, relaxing, watching television. Its complexity is not technological but functional: the sofa is a portrait of contemporary humankind. It is their throne.

Design is no longer at the service of technology. Like painting, music or cinema, it is a medium for the manifestation of art

From the end of the 1960s I was for two decades art director of Cassina, and for many years I also directed its research centre. This was Cesare Cassina’s brainchild, directly supported by him and founded with Piero Busnelli. I had ample freedom of choice and it was a lively, unconstrained period. Research was already producing signifiers and what’s more there was no marketing; or if there was, it was inherent in the research itself. Edra is quite a similar sort of outfit, and young. It was started in 1987, before the end of my association with Cassina in 1992. Massimo Morozzi had told me he was preparing an operation for the 25th anniversary of radical design. He asked me to design a product for this initiative. Years earlier I had invented a collection for Venini called Il Cielo. Dedicated to the hybrid, to two mutually attracted cultures, I had pictured it as a couple in an erotic state on their way to an unknown destination. I had an idea for a sofa, and showed it to Morozzi. It was actually a painting, not a conclusive design, but it communicated an image, movement and interactivity. We set to work on it, and the result was L’Homme et la Femme. We showed it at the Cologne Furniture Fair where it was well received.

Material does not suggest form. If anything it raises a question and arouses curiosity

As a young man my mind was full of “what” to do; now I am fascinated by “how”. The principle lies not in the brief, but in the way a thing is done. I like to work on canonical types and to invent new ones: Sherazade- Odalisca is a very simple invention. However, it is concerned with the same kind of interactivity between users and objects that can be found in my previous designs. In this latest case I have removed any evidence of technological aspects, of the industrial design type. The sofa is interactive in an elementary way: to use it differentlly Normality appeals to me, and I like altering it. Sofà is a bit like that: an archetype of a sofa that springs from a constructive invention. Edra has acquired a technique which gives the cushions high quality performance. By combining a special gel with kapok, a material of vegetal origin, you get cushions that are padded cages, empty inside, that can be used to make robust yet soft objects. Sofà’s form was immediately appealing on account of its exact proportions, even though it was quite hard to make. For example, with this technique it is diffi cult to obtain a straight line when necessary. The challenge of normality, meaning what complies “to the norm”, is exciting. I’m interested in the subtle space between one solution and another, for example the one that exists between an Eames chair and the idea of Jacobsen’s 3107 bearing body… In that borderland there is a lot to be discovered and invented. I look at Sofà and I think: it’s a sofa. Whereas Flap is an invention. It is an object that “rises”: from the horizontal plane, which seats up to 20 persons, the backrests (one, two, all) are lifted to create the different confi gurations that make it a sumptuous chaise longue or a multi-seater sofa. The idea behind the design is certainly important, but it is Flap’s form that makes it communicative and successful. It reminds me of the atmosphere of the Hollywood pools in Hockney’s paintings… Upholstering is like painting group portraits: seeing how people are seated, and translating behaviour into an image.

It takes art to succeed in governing ever more sophisticated technology

I am interested in reproducibility, the non-artisan aspect of design, because after Duchamp the vision of art changed completely. Reading Proust, I discovered the beauty of uselessness. The connection with uselessness is intriguing… the rules are there but they are more inward. I am interested in what can emerge from the undifferentiated, which to my mind is the obscure, sick limit of standard sameness; I am interested in what can be cut and picked out from the haze of digital fi ne dust. The better a designer can enable others, or the manufacturer, to make things, the better he will be. My story with Edra is the result of my great interest in a relationship in which it is the symbiosis between the designer and the maker that creates the product. Concluding an intensive study of sofas, Sherazade and Sofà are emblematic in this respect.”