In a recent article, Architectural Digest’s Senior Design Editor Hannah Martin un-wraps the role avant-garde artist couple, the late Christo and Jeanne-Claude, played in the creation of Italian architect Cini Boeri's iconic Strips sofa for Arflex.
In the 1960s, avant-garde artist couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude began wrapping monuments around the world in fabric and rope. A sculpture in the garden of Rome’s Villa Borghese (1963). A gilded statue on Paris’s Place du Trocadéro (1964). The monument to Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo (1970). The arresting visuals gave Italian architect Cini Boeri an idea: Why not wrap a sofa? (Christo and Jeanne-Claude had wrapped furniture too, for what it’s worth, but they didn’t exactly prioritize function.)
Boeri did. In 1968 she began experimenting with simple molded-polyurethane forms that could be encased in removable quilts, almost like her children’s sleeping bags. The so-called Strips series, a name derived from that easy-to-undress design, was practical as ever: “The shell can be slipped off, washed, changed, put back on, and zipped up like a dress over a polyurethane body,” she wrote in 1974. Some of the models even allowed the user to be zipped cozily inside.
The Strips sofa designed by Italian architect Cini Boeri in 1968 was inpired by the work of artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Photo c/o Arflex.
The modular seats, sofas, and beds – which looked like building blocks wearing puffer coats – were officially unveiled in 1971 with Italian manufacturer Arflex. By 1979 it had proved itself – it was awarded the covetable Italian design award, the Compasso d’Oro and, as Boeri bragged, “Hollywood actors wanted it,” making it “widely sold in America.”
Read the full story by Hannah Martin (February 9, 2022 edition) in Architectureal Digest.
Arflex is availalbe exclusively in South East Asia from Space – Australia, and Space – Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.
