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The legendary Famiglia Antropus: a comfortable seat and a construction that requires very little space combined with a sturdy, elegant design that showed the way for many subsequent evelopments.
The following comes from an interview published by ‘Ottagono’ in 1980: Marco Zanuso relates that this chair was created in 1949 in the course of experiments with foam rubber at Pirelli before arflex was set up. They were difficult years, and these were the first attempts to identify ways to manufacture, on an industrial scale, foam rubber upholstery for domestic use.
The problem was that the upholsterer would no longer be standing in front of his workbench making chairs one by one in accordance with the pattern, or crafting them from fabric and wool. The product would first have to be divided into its component parts, which would then be machine-made independently of each other before being assembled at the end of the process, just like any other assembly line-manufactured commodity.
Zanuso points out that in his experience as a designer, this model - which only went into production thirty years later - was above all an important opportunity to experiment in the transition from craft-based manufacturing methods to industrial processes.
"As we look into the future, we cannot allow ourselves to lose sight of the new distribution standards. We must design for them. There will be increasingly little space to play with and only what is necessary will go into that space. There will be no room for anything superfluous ...".
"That’s the attitude that a designer has to have”, Zanuso goes on, ”and in that context it could well happen that the individual will again appreciate the significance of the single object, a significance that has been lost in the recent, violent refusal of the identified object ".
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