Quite a popular milestone in Italian cinema history, the sketch featuring Giandomenico Fracchia and the Sacco chair shows an oppressed clerk being invited (i.e. forced) by his sadistic boss to sit in front of his throne-like desk, on a bean bag chair, whence the clumsy man pitifully and irreparably rolls down. Although harshly satirizing all classist abuses of power — which often found silent allies in the world of design — this scene also depicts a then widespread skepticism towards a game changer, an object that in spite of its indecipherable appearance was redefining the rules of the game in its own category.
“You may sit on that bag”: 21 game changers in domestic design
Car headlights becoming floor lamps, baseball gloves becoming armchairs, and a selection of other outrageous objects that questioned the rules of their category.
Joe is a scaleshifter, translating into furniture a symbol of a whole era: Joe Di Maggio’s baseball glove. The result is manufactured by Poltronova, the iconic brand to produce the radical designs by Archizoom and Superstudio: a metal-framed polyurethane armchair with leather upholstery which is a Pop Art work in itself, close to those developed by Claes Oldenburg, at that time and later.
Ceretti, De Rossi and Rosso, in the heyday of Pop Art in its connection to Italian Radical groups, rethought the act itself of sitting and relaxing, enriching the Multipli collection by Gufram with nothing but a lawn unit. This can be seamlessly combined with other similar ones, made as well of soft and elastic one-meter-tall blades of expanded polyurethane grass, where one can lounge comfortably and unconventionally.
A protest days’ child, discussing all assumptions of its typology, this chair was conceived as vinyl bag filled up with polystyrene beans, the utmost shapeless object: its concept was both inspired by a need for less formal vision on living spaces, and by the idea of creatin an anatomic chair, adapting to the users’ bodies and choices. Shown at MoMA in New York for Italy: the new domestic landscape 1972 exhibition, Sacco is also part of permanent design collections at the MoMA itself, at Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Victoria&Albert in London and Triennale Design Museum in Milan.
A chair made of a tubular steel frame, fabric strips and nothing else: the first questioning of the furniture design conventions to be based on production research, the B3 project came out in 1926 from the furniture workshops of Bauhaus Dessau under the direction of Marcel Breuer. The prototype frame was manufactured by Mannesmann, the first commercial pieces by Standard in Berlin; still, it was in 1962 that Dino Gavina made this chair a mass market success, also introducing the leather strips; a success which is still lasting, also after Gavina was purchased by Knoll in 1968.
Favela has got shape, but no precise structure: this one is made up of an assemblage of pine slats (teak slats for exteriors), glued or nailed, all different, creating properly unique pieces. It is the same methodology on which houses are built in Brazilian informal settlements, and the designers’ point was to emphasize the importance of different production technologies in the design process. (picture via edra.com)
This table/floor lamp is created by the direct semantic merging of two objects (a suitcase and a lamp), and while announcing a forthcoming era — the Memphis world — it gifts the user with both a portable light island and a small vaulted architecture, to “make home anywhere” as it often happens when one is travelling.
Rigid PVC industrial pipes: Cini Boeri transposed a set of technical components into the domestic environment, valorizing their potential in giving an adaptive response to a new habitat; 602 is in fact an adjustable table lamp standing out as both a reflection on the shape in Modern aesthetics and on the objet trouvé.
An open challenge to middle-class living rooms, by means of objets trouvés: a car headlight, a fishing rod component to hold the wire, a frame saw, all of them connected by a thin hexagonal chrome steel bar. Everything is in plain sight, the composition is enough to literally build the space around its shape and its indirect lighting; to build it anywhere, by the way, as the whole system is extremely easy to carry from place to place.
The two designers, working as Studio Opi, revolutionized an entire typology by appling the conceptual filter of the “light box”. Moving form metaphor to reality: a cubic box made of ABS — a polymer with a very wide range of applications, including the body of the Citroën Méhari — turns on a lightbulb as its top is flipped, revealing a reflecting interior surface. In a lifetime of almost 50 years, Cuboluce has had different surface restyling, and today it also employs LED technology without losing the iconic shape that made it a part of permanent design collection at MoMA in New York. (photo via cinienils.com)
Maurer told that he once could hardly hold back a rebel yell, while visiting a Salone del Mobile (Milan international furniture fair) that was filled up with too much glossy perfection. An explosion of broken dishes, a domestic Zabriskie Point scene was then the answer, a handmade suspension lamp that finally drew its name from the exclamations of the visitors as it was first shown in Milan (Damn!). Each single Porca Miseria! is a unique handcrafted piece, and since 2006 Maurer had started to create some pieces using China figurines. (photo via ingo-maurer.com)
In 1932, Fortunato Depero had already explored the plastic and chromatic effects of the interaction between the bright red Campari liqueur and a cone-shaped glass bottle. 70 years later, Campari Light definitely raised the bar: through repetition and combination, Campari becomes pure light, the main component of a largely popular suspension lamp, inspiring several similar projects with its simple design principle. (photo Omar Ruzza, cc by-sa 4.0)
Immediately recognized as the icon of Memphis, an historically transversal world (spanning across different identities with its double nature of both a company and a collective), this design work demands the center of the room as very few others would, satirizing precious materials, ancient and modern references by reproducing their shapes and patterns on its laminate surfaces. A powerful short circuit between furniture and architecture is generated, suggesting the presence of some kind of monument for interiors.
The very symbol of bourgeois decoration fulfils one of the most conventionally indecent functions of design: a thermoplastic resin ornamental plant is in fact a toilet brush, or, well, vice versa. As it happened with other concepts by Giovannoni, Merdolino would stir up mixed feelings upon its launch, only to become an immediate and successful instant classic. (photo via alessi.com)
Please, always remember not to lean on any Gaetano Pesce vase, nor to try and hurl it in the hope to get any satisfactory dramatic crash. In full contrast with leading design practices of his times, Pesce created a brand to manufacture plastics according to common, non-specialized technologies: the shape and aesthetics of the final product depended on the choices of the single factory worker, manually blending different shades of a soft, elastic resin into the mold. The uniqueness of each shape and tactile experience are an open provocation against over-complexification of production and the static image of decorative objects. (photo from Domus 776, November 1995)
A common I-beam, its two ends slightly folded pointing upwards, becomes a centerpiece or a tray, disclosing a less celebrated side of Mari’s personality, fascinated by the industrial ethics and aesthetics of the early Moderns. Deyan Sudjic has been describing this object as “...so distant from Mari’s Autoprogettazione open source furniture. Despite his radicalism, Mari knew how to make objects that could offer something out of the ordinary.”
This is a textbook example of design by intuition, jumping straight to the prototyping phase without any preparatory drawing: Aulenti saw the trolleys employed in the glass manufacturing plants and decided to experiment the combination of free-rolling industrial wheels with a beveled glass slab. Another instant classic aiming to show how the separation between industrial and domestic world can be nothing but pure appearance. (photo via fontanaarte.com)
The table with bird’s feet that you can now buy as any other piece of furniture was born a surrealist work of art, shown by Oppenheim at the 1939 Exhibition of Fantastic Furniture at René Drouin and Leo Castelli’s Parisian gallery. Classic furniture, the drawing room table, the ancient chest of drawers with lion’s feet: all this is mocked and transfigured into a polished bronze cast, standing on slim bird’s feet (leaving their mark on the table top) and joining the works of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray in the Surrealist team. (photo advertising from Domus 920, December 2018)
In 1988 Starck conceived what two years later would become not just The citrus juicer par excellence, but The utmost Design Object, the ultimate domestic scene cliché in movies, and an immediate commercial success. Matter of fact, Juicy Salif is a die-cast aluminum citrus juicer, evocating a spider’s body with its sleek outline, also produced in limited anniversary series, cast in bronze or even gold. (photo via alessi.com)
Analogy, and scale shifting: Rossi used to say that the coffee maker was an object he loved to design because of its wide presence in figurative art and its analogies with architectural shapes. In 1979, the year before his Teatro del Mondo for the Venice Biennale, Alesandro Mendini became art director of Officina Alessi and invited Rossi to submit a proposal for the Tea and Coffee Piazza project: the Milanese architect would create a temple-like tray carrying a cluster of downscaled architectures. Conica was originated by that project , and several other miniaturized architetures would follow, including the Cupola coffee maker (1988). (photo via alessi.com)
The encounter of epic design trajectories, such as Caccia Dominioni’s and Castiglioni’s, could not help but express a deepest rethinking of the most popular media device of an era, starting from its components. Leaving the “piece of furniture” aesthetics apart, this budget Bakelite-and-metal radio appliance brings a brand-new shape inside living spaces, inspired by telephone bodies, very handy and easy to use. (photo museoscienza.org. Museo nazionale della scienza e della tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, Milano, cc by-sa 4.0)
With TS522, the radio officially became a design piece to be shown in living spaces for its shape. Such shape came from a radical rethinking of the layout of components, a systemic process distributing the elements between two plastic cubes, which could be open or closed, to form an orange-red parallelepiped box, the proper abstract allegory of The Design Object form the 60s. TS522 is also part of the permanent collections of several design museums worldwide, including MoMA in New York.
View Article details
- Giovanni Comoglio
- 07 June 2021
The history of contemporary design is sprinkled with objects that transformed the grammar of domestic space through a simple yet radical operation: the extrapolation of shapes and components form their original context of function and sense, and their application to a totally new, or even stranger function, sense or scale. It is a quite outrageous design approach: gloves becoming chairs, car headlights becoming floor lamps, often reaching the role of representatives of an entire object typology.
We often and easily associate such operation to Postmodernism — the plastic duck becoming a house, à la Robert Venturi — but it would be more correct to recognize it as the starting point of many capital moments, often defining the end or the start of entire eras: Modern architecture (Le Corbusier’s fascinations for cars and grain silos, for instance), the Radical season, systemic design or Surrealism before all of them. You are invited by Domus to a short journey across a selection of such outrageous game changers, and with the side-note certainty that the author of this article, despite being more than two meters tall, has always found the Sacco chair extremely comfortable.