The chair, abolished

Around 1968, Italian design stopped being polite. The Sacco — a sack of beads by Gatti, Paolini and Teodoro — had no frame, no legs, no 'correct' way to sit. It simply took the shape of whoever fell into it.

It arrived at a moment when a whole generation of Italian designers had decided that furniture could carry ideas, not just bodies — that an object might be a manifesto you could also sit on.

The chair as argument

The Sacco had company. Willie Landels' Throw-away sofa hid its structure inside foam so completely that it looked poured rather than built. Superstudio's Quaderna wore a printed grid like a slogan, refusing to pretend a table was anything but a plane. De Pas, D'Urbino and Lomazzi reduced a coat stand to a bundle of dowels that opened like a fan — Sciangai, awarded a Compasso d'Oro in 1979.

No frame, no legs, no correct way to sit.

None of these were jokes, though several are funny. They were arguments about what an object is for, made in a language — foam, plastic, print, plywood — that ordinary furniture had been too respectable to speak.

Why it needed a manufacturer

A manifesto is cheap; a manufactured manifesto is not. The radical pieces of the late 1960s could easily have stayed as prototypes and magazine covers. What made them real was a company willing to tool up, solve the production problems and stand behind the result.

Zanotta was that company — almost alone in treating anti-design as something to engineer properly rather than exhibit once. The Sacco is still filled, sewn and finished to the original method; the argument still holds its shape.

Radical, sixty years on

Time has been kind to these objects precisely because they were never fashionable in the first place. A piece designed to provoke a question rather than flatter a trend does not date the way a styled one does.

That is why a Sacco or a Sciangai still looks current in a room today: it was never trying to look current. It was trying to make you think — and it still does.