Mama knows best: B&B Italia UP50

A series of iconic designs is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year: the ”UP” collection created by Gaetano Pesce for B&B Italia in 1969. It has been kept in production by the Novedrate-based company and today is nothing less than a design classic, included in the collections of renowned museums like the MoMA and the V&A in London.

Pesce, a trained architect, started his foray into furniture design with the UP series at a crucial time. In the late sixties, design could suddenly become a bold commentary on the social upheavals and political issues of the time. As he once said: ”The object must not be the expression of itself. It's not enough to create soft stuff to make people sit on it.” His goal was – and still is today – to give shape to ideas that communicate to people in a subtle, sometimes ambiguous way, in order to reach them both on an intellectual and on an emotional level.

So let's take a closer look at the series that has made its mark both as an icon of sixties design in general and as the emblematic example of Italian furniture design. First of all, every element of the 7-piece collection bears a number. UP 1 to 4 are very coherent in their design language, playing with the idea of a round, pebble-like armchair coming in various sizes while UP 4, a sofa, appears like the stretched version of the one-seater. UP 5 & 6, however, formulate a radically new concept of what furniture design can be.

Now the most well-known element of the collection, featured in countless magazines and movies, UP 5, also known as ”Big Mama”, is a sculpture-like abstraction of the female body, with a huge ball attached to it, named UP 6, functioning as an ottoman. In its original version it was vacuum-packed, and when unboxed, unfolded before your eyes. Like a work of art, it has many layers. First, its cosy qualities come to mind. Whoever rests in it will turn into a child again, sitting on his or her mama's lap. A place of comfort and peace. This alone is a wonderfully ironic commentary to the prototypical ”Italian mama”, the real head of the family – loud, big, brave and strong! But by attaching a big ball to her, Pesce gave his design a deeper meaning, stressing the position of a woman in society as not being free, but being tied to the constraints of her gender in ”a man's world”.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary, an entirely new collection called UP50 was introduced by B&B Italia and showcased at Via Durini 14 during the 2019 Milan Design Week. It now has new solid colours (orange-red, navy blue, petrol green, emerald green and cardamom), while a special, striped beige/petrol green version is now available that refers to the original colour palette of 1969. And in a new, collage-like animation trailer produced by B&B Italia, the UP collection comes to life as a hallmark of the space-age era – featuring Salvador Dalí, Anita Ekberg, Apollo 11 and the famous vintage advertising motives by Swiss photographer Klaus Zaugg: models wearing white afro wigs, placed in a surreal-looking landscape alongside the UP furniture pieces.

But let's not forget the equally surreal and surprising, last part of the collection: the UP 7, a huge foot, 162cm (63 3/4 inches) long, blown-up Pop-Art-style and thus appearing to be a colossal relict of ancient times. However soft, made today from a flexible cold shaped polyurethane foam, thus functioning as a chaise longue – and as an intriguing eye-catcher in any home.

© Architonic