Beanbag chair

Water was unyielding, ping-pong balls too expensive, but expanded polystyrene pellets were just right for Gatti's 'big sack'

IN 1968, THREE young and innovative Italian architects from Turin - Cesare Paolini, Pierro Gatti and Franco Teodoro disregarded all preconceived notions of what constitutes a chair and proposed a radically different seating solution. It was the antithesis of the hard-edged minimalist aesthetic that had preoccupied industrial designers for much of the 20th Century.

They called it Sacco and that's exactly what it was, a brightly coloured pear-shaped deformable sack stuffed with a few million expanded polystyrene pellets. No legs, no arms, no rigid components.

One of the sacred tenets of the mid-20th Century industrial designer was 'form follows function, yet here was an artefact that had a function and only the loosest relationship with the norm of 'form. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Sacco strongly resembled a Claes Oldenburg version of something that might have been deposited on the pavement by a passing canine.