Grass at the wrong scale
Pratone looks like a small patch of grass until you put a person beside it. The blades become large enough to sit among. Giorgio Ceretti, Piero Derossi and Riccardo Rosso turned a familiar outdoor surface into something that surrounds the body.1
For a sense of scale, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s 1986 example is roughly 1.4 metres wide and almost a metre high. That height is the top of the grass, rather than a conventional seat height.4 The body belongs down between the blades. A photograph without a sitter can disguise just how much of the furniture rises around you.
The material makes room
Gufram makes the forty-two blades from soft polyurethane, finished with its Guflac coating. Their ability to yield is essential: replace them with rigid spikes and the invitation disappears.1
On a conventional armchair, the seat, back and arms tell you where to settle before you touch it. Pratone leaves that arrangement open. The spaces between the blades and the softness of the foam have to work together as a body sinks into the patch.
That is the more interesting surprise after the grass joke. The exaggerated blades are both the obstacle you see and the material that gives way. Finding a position becomes part of encountering the design.
A sofa without allotted places
There are no cushion seams marking a place for each sitter, and no single upholstered back facing the room. Read as shared seating, Pratone makes people negotiate their positions within one small territory. This interpretation follows its form; individual experiences of comfort will differ.
Its appearance in MoMA’s 1972 exhibition catalogue, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, puts that experiment in context. The subject was the home and how people might live in it. The designers’ experimental work also fed into Gruppo Strum, formed in 1971.23
Pratone gives that large architectural question a bodily scale. A seat can quietly direct us to sit upright, face forwards and keep to one cushion. Here those familiar instructions dissolve into soft green blades. The sitter has some arranging to do.