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About this product
Architonic ID: 1001216
Year of Launch: 2000
Up 1 easy chair
100 x 100 x H 67 cm
39 3/8" x 39 3/8" x H 26 3/8" inch
Concept
The Up series of anthropomorphic seats, among which the Up 5_6 is world renown, came about in 1969 through the collaboration of C&B Italia (the company from which B&B Italia evolved) and Gaetano Pesce.
The meeting between artist and industry had already been announced by two projects the year before: Yeti, a padded monolithic armchair, and Vela (meaning sail) which was an expression of Pesce's constant search for an innovative yet formal style.
With the Up series, from one side Gaetano Pesce brought his own personal idea of the woman to light. “I was telling a personal story about my notion of women: despite themselves, women have always been prisoners of their own making. Along these lines, I liked the idea of giving this armchair a feminine shape with a ball and chain, the traditional image of the prisoner.”
On the other side was a company which, having a great deal of technological know-how for product development, brought Pesce’s idea to life and transformed it into a piece of modern art available to a broad range of people. Out of this, a series of seats arose, seven to be exact: timeless furnishings expressing a universal idea, created with the foremost advancements in development and technology.
Updated and reproduced by B&B Italia in 2000 with high performance materials, today these chairs are amongst the products that best represent the company's long path towards innovation.
In polyurethane foam and upholstered in stretch fabric, the chairs were initially vacuum packed, with a reduction in volume of 90%: the “expanding” effect once they came into contact with the air was as unique, spectacular and expressive of the style and technical pairing that set this product apart. Today, vacuum packing has been replaced by further research on materials, making it possible to use longer lasting elements.
Famed among design collections, exhibited in the international museums around the world and recently in the new exhibit by Antonio Citterio in the Museum of Design at the Milan Triennale, the Up series today celebrates its 40th birthday. Still looking great after all these years, this birthday is also the chance to present the Up5_6 armchair with a new silver upholstery, personalized with a serial numer.
This pop-culture furniture piece expresses all the unabashed energy of the Sixties, as well as a new technology and a provoking philosophy on women's conditions. The Up5_6 armchair, a timeless icon of Italian design, is still full of all that special energy of 40 years ago.
Happy Birthday Up!
Structure: Bayfit® (Bayer®) flexible cold
shaped polyurethane foam
Cover: jersey fabric
Bottom base: fabric 100% jute
This product belongs to collection:
Specifications
Usage
Contract, Hospitality, Residential
Distributors
Designers
Gaetano Pesce
Italy
During his career, that spans four decades with commissions in architecture, urban planning, interior, exhibition and industrial design, Gaetano Pesce, the architect and designer, has conceived public and private projects in the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia. In all his work, he expresses his guiding principle: that modernism is less a style than a method for interpreting the present and hinting at the future in which individuality is preserved and celebrated. Born in La Spezia, Italy, in 1939, Pesce studied Architecture at the University of Venice between 1958 to 1963 and was a participant in Gruppo N, an early collective concerned with programmed art patterned after the Bauhaus. He taught architecture at the Institut d’Architecture et d’Etudes Urbaines in Strasbourg, France, for 28 years, at the Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, at the Domus Academy in Milan, at the Polytechinc of Hong Kong, at the Architectural School of Sao Paulo and at the Cooper Union in New York City, where he has made his home since 1980, after living in Venice, London, Helsinki and Paris. Pesce’s work is featured in over 30 permanent collections of the most important museums in the world, such as MoMa of New York and San Francisco, Metropolitan Museum in New York, Vitra Museum in Germany, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Pompidou Center and Musee des Arts Décoratifs of Louvre in Paris; he exhibits art in galleries world wide. His award winning designs include the prestigious Chrysler Award for Innovation and Design in 1993, the Architektur and Wohnen Designer of the Year in 2006 and the Lawrence J. Israel Prize from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York in 2009. Pesce experience has been global, his innovations consistently groundbreaking. Boundaries between art, design and industry are irrelevant to him, as art is most certainly not something created and put on a pedestal: art is a product, it is our creative response to the needs of the time we live in.