Red Up 5 and Up 6 by Gaetano Pesce

The last photo together with the Superlegerra Chair by Gio Ponti.

 

Up 5 and Up 6 by Gaetano Pesce

I took this photo September 24, 2011 in the Milan Triennale Design Museum

Up 5 and Up 6 embodies aqn extraordinary innovative technological value and is strongly charged with symbolic and expressive significance. This is a chair made entirely of polyurethane and covered with a mesh of nylon and jersey. It has no inner structure. Madeof a single material, it is soft, inviting, friendly.Its design marking a break with traditional armchairs. It is a block of foam, with sufficient density to be self-supporting. It has an anthropomorphic form, looking rather like a prehistorian female fertility statue. It also invokes the voloptuousness of the female body with senuous lines and curves. But Gaetanon Pesce added a ball tied to the armchair which serves as a footrest. It vaguely recals the ball and chain in popular pictures of convicts.
The packaging was also entirely new, being designed to facilitate portability. When it was put into production by the firm then called B&B Italia, it was presented at the Salone del Mobile in Milan in a kind of happening. The chair, once completed, was transported in a vacuum chamber to reduce the volume to about 10% of its natural size and then wrapped into a sealed plastic airtight wrapping. At the presentation the plastic wrappings were opened and little by little began to come alive, expanding and taking shape and body, thanks to the ambient air which penetrated into the capillaries of the polyurethane foam. Up 5 and Up 6 were produced during a few years onward from 1973. It then went out of production. It was reissued bby B&B Italia in 2000.

Milan Triennale Design Museum – 19

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Chairs!
gje

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