The Design Of The Iconic Up Armchair And Its Cult Status
Back in 1968, then young 29-year-old up-and-coming architect and designer, Gaetano Pesce, had an "Eureka!" moment in his bathtub. "I had a sponge in my hand. When I pressed the sponge, it shrank, and when I released it, it returned to its original volume." The sudden question he asked himself: couldn't an armchair behave in the same way, occupied him so much that he started experimenting in his Paris studio with the hippest material of that moment - polyurethane. What emerged from these intense experiments as a finished product the following year, is the completely original and more than 5 decades later still fascinating armchair Up, affectionately called "La Mamma", "Big Mamma" and "Donna".
Attractive and completely unconventional, this armchair combined art and technology even in the very act of unpacking - wrapped up in a flat, almost two-dimensional PVC cover, upon opening it would begin its "performance" of self-inflating into a final, seductive and sensual form that was very clearly reminiscent of the female form.
The shape itself has a conscious direct connection to representations of the female body from the earliest civilizations - the creator wanted the association to be clear and primal, drawing on a phenomenon Jung calls the "collective unconscious". But behind this sensual form is not just mere aesthetics, and that is why La Mamma is one of the best examples of design aimed at the collective subconscious, because it works on several visual and psychological levels.
In the lower part, the armchair is connected by a chain to a smaller ottoman in the shape of a ball. The essence of the entire design is actually, some would say feminism, and we would say basic humanism. Pesce wanted to point out the unsatisfactory position of women in society with a design that refers to the archaic depiction of a prisoner with a lead ball chained to his ankle. "Women suffer because of men's prejudices. This chair speaks about exactly that problem.... I told a personal story about how I see a woman: despite herself and completely unwillingly, a woman has always been her own prisoner. The issue of male violence towards women had only just started being talked about at the time. Back then, I thought that this serious sign of incivility, which was happening all over the world, would have lessened with time. Unfortunately, however, that was not the case."
La Mamma quickly gained cult status, partly based on an advertising campaign based on provocative photos whose futuristic style layed somewhere between Barbarella and Amazonian women warriors. Despite this, the manufacturing of the Up armchair already stopped by 1973, because in the meantime the devastating effect of freon gas, used for its production, on the ozone layer was discovered.
Although production continued some 30 years later, Up made its first real big comeback in 2019, when B&B Italia, the original manufacturer (formerly known as C&B), reissued a copy of the original armchair, the Up50, in beige and petrol green stripes in honor of 50 year since the "birth" of this Venus.
In the same year, as part of Design Week, a large installation called "Maestà Sofferente" or "Suffering Majesty" was organized in Piazza del Duomo in Milan. Pesce, this time more as an artist than a designer, placed the 8-meter high "La Mamma" in front of the cathedral. Pierced by numerous arrows and surrounded by a series of animal heads made of polystyrene and fiberglass, this oversized figure was his way to once again express his attitude towards the oppressive relation towards women, to point out their unenviable position and raise his voice against violence against them. The installation also caused some conflicting reactions from certain feminist movements, who considered that Gaetano was in fact treating the woman as part of the furniture, but it also prompted certain environmental movements to criticize him for his use of polyurethane. This eccentric creator was not swayed. He rejected the criticism as unfounded in both cases - he considered that his artistic and political representation of the "female side" was clear from his design beginnings, and he highlighted the use of synthetic materials as a stage of ongoing progress which cannot be excluded.
The series Up2000 has been on sale since 2000. Armchairs are no longer packed in vacuum bags, and freon is certainly no longer used in the production process, instead they are now made of flexible cold-formed polyurethane foam, while the cover is made of elastic synthetic materials. The new color palette includes dozen of options, and there is also a Junior collection, intended for children. At Milan Design Week 2021, the Up armchair made entirely of cork from recycled bottles was presented to the world, as a clear continuation of Pesce's design philosophy of progress.
This versatile creator has gained numerous admirers through his work in the field of architecture as well, which is also unusual and highly individualized. He believes in a design process based on a specific space, both geographical and cultural, as well as on a specific client. Each project is maximally personalized.
Gaetano Pesce himself says that he is a product of the cities where his parents come from: he learned the importance of color from the heritage of Venice from his mother's side, and from the heritage of Florence from his father's side, the importance of basic drawing. He knows no boundaries between art, architecture and design. Art is not placed on an unattainable pedestal - it is precisely the product, our creative response to the needs of the times in which we live. Curiosity is what inspires and drives him, and some of the fruits of that curiosity are included in permanent exhibits in over 30 museums worldwide: MoMA in New York and San Francisco, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil on Rhine, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Pompidou Center and the Museum of Decorative Arts of Louvre in Paris... He is the laureate of numerous prestigious awards in the field of design, and he also worked as a lecturer at universities from Strasbourg, through Milan, Hong Kong, Sao Paolo, to New York, where he still lives.
"There is a god, and it is time. And time, in this way or another, decide everything we do. It creates values... It is our job to understand what the time is telling us today, and try to express it."
"Our time is a liquid time. Liquidity allows you to be free. Values dissapear, they change. This is the beauty of our time. The static life is horrible. It's like dying before time." G.P.
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