Description

Here is a rare and incredibly comfortable armchair by Gaetano Pesce for Cassina. This model can be found in the collection of Centre Pompidou Paris and the MoMa Museum in New York City.

Information from the 1975 Cassina ‘Sit Down series’  presentation at the Milan furniture fair:

Sitting has become one of the characterizations of our time. Every day everyone gives up individual behavior to calm the imposed consciousness that asks us more or less ‘freely’ to be part of the ‘large number’.

‘This transformation is due to the habit of easily delegating decisions about the attitude to be taken to someone else, thereby becoming an entity that we will call ‘series- individuals’.

‘As I have seen before, our century of equality has continued in the name of ‘easy justice’ by planning everything and has been able to present everything as a product for profit reasons.

Although some enlightened people of the last century denounced this dangerous trend, we have now managed to distort society, work, leisure, information, artistic expression, and all other aspects of existence, including the individual, under the guise of uniformity.

‘The most sublime and hidden repression of the consumer was created by the ideology of functional rationalism under the guise of social motives. Since then, architecture, furniture,  and the like, among others, have been planned and designed as products that ‘allegedly meet the ever-ext growing social needs of the masses.’ This has led to neglect – that was to be expected – the demands of each or small social group, and on the contrary, the different needs were considered one indication of the average planning. Today’s result is an increasingly strong architecture in an ‘international,’ repressive, cubic style and an alienating production of more or less useless objects that do not express our so-determined socio-cultural reality, except for a few supposedly aesthetic vague concepts. In short, the ‘great masters’ of functionalism, plundered by unscrupulous speculators, have destroyed our cities and landscapes. It has influenced our lives through its spontaneity, which was overly replaced by anything that hinders the free self-determination of the individual and his taste.

‘We are in an absurd situation where our fears are often caused by fear of the unexpected. We feel with a clear conscience when each day of our lives is the same as the others when our needs are equal to those of others – the same goes for our thoughts, ambitions, and ambitions.

“We are afraid when we don’t know what we will do and will be in two, five, ten, fifty years, and we are satisfied with what our role has been declared, depending on the different seasons of our lives. For example, despite the twenty unfortunate years of fascism, we love conformism and fear the unexpected that could disturb our ‘rest.’

‘But small groups have already begun to question the idea that our time — the era of consumption or technology — can last indefinitely and solve humanity’s problems.

I am convinced that ‘death makes us equal, and that life means that we are different’; because we have this right, I believe that things around us in daily life should also claim this privilege. On the contrary, just as the Spartans threw people from the top of Mount Taygetto who did not meet the ideal physical characteristics, the industry left behind objects that did not have the required aesthetic and conformity characteristics. And someone who buys something and thinks they have something personal is regularly disappointed. »

“These objects are the consequence of several considerations on the simplest technique and the polyurethane foam used in the least complex way to obtain individual, similar but not identical serial parts. (In short, it is a square of padded fabric fixed to the perimeter on a wooden frame, and everything is put in a rudimentary mold to draw only the seat and backrest, leaving the rest of the object free. The polyurethane injected from below inflates freely and spontaneously, except where it meets the reverse side of the seat and creates a different shape each time). This is how an object is born that opposes the outdated message of traditional design that had nothing to do, after all, with everyday reality and expressed only evasive and unnecessarily idealistic aesthetic rules. On the contrary, the reality on which the inspiration of the pieces of the Sit Down series is based is the one where free self-determination is possible at the expense of the “beauty” desired by the nostalgic epigones of Weimar and Dessau, a beauty that has long caused the monotony of interior fittings and the conformism of spaces. ”