The Pratone Grass Sofa and Gufram's Radical Meadow

Most furniture teaches the body to behave. The chair holds the back straight, the sofa keeps a polite distance from the floor, the table sets everyone at the same height. In 1971 three architects in Turin proposed something less obedient: a patch of lawn, oversized and bright green, that you could drop into and lie in. They called it Pratone, which in Italian means something like a big meadow, and more than fifty years later it is still the most convincing argument that a living room can contain a landscape.

The company that made it had only existed for five years. Gufram was founded in 1966 by the Gugliermetto brothers, furniture makers in Turin, and its name is a contraction of Gugliermetto Fratelli Mobili. What set it apart was a material. Gufram worked with polyurethane foam, soft, mouldable and new, and it invited artists and young architects to use it for objects that looked like one thing and behaved like another. At the Milan Triennale of 1968 it presented the Multipli, art objects reproduced industrially in limited editions. Piero Gilardi's Sassi, a set of river stones you could sit on, belonged to that idea. So did almost everything that followed.

Pratone came from Giorgio Ceretti, Pietro Derossi and Riccardo Rosso, three members of the Turin collective Gruppo Strum. The name was short for architettura strumentale, instrumental architecture, and the group saw design as one way of taking part in the social and political arguments of the time. Their seat has no seat. It is a block of 42 tall blades of polyurethane, each one worked and finished by hand with Gufram's own coating, Guflac, a process that takes five weeks per piece. The blades bend when you lean into them and close around you when you lie down, and the word Pratone is pressed into the base like a signature on a building.

A year after its launch, the seat appeared on the cover of the catalogue for Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, the exhibition curated by Emilio Ambasz at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972. The show introduced American audiences to the Italian designers who were questioning what a home should be, and Gruppo Strum took part by handing out free photo novels, the cheap illustrated stories sold at Italian newsstands, filled with their own political ideas. It is hard to imagine a better portrait of the movement now called Radical Design: serious about society, and entirely willing to be funny about furniture.

Pratone had good company at Gufram. Studio 65 turned a pair of lips into the Bocca sofa in 1970 and, a year later, carved the Capitello as the soft, oversized head of a classical column. Guido Drocco and Franco Mello made the Cactus in 1972, a coat stand shaped like a desert plant. Each of these objects plays the same trick. The eye expects stone, grass or thorns, and the body finds something warm that gives way. It is the reason Gufram still describes its own history as a single question: what is furniture.

The design has rarely stood still since. The Vitra Design Museum lists Pratone among its hundred masterpieces of design. In 2012 Gufram produced the Nordic Pratone, the same meadow in white, as though it had been left out in the snow. In 2013 the artists behind the magazine TOILETPAPER, Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, photographed it for their own piece of mischief. And for its fiftieth anniversary in 2021, a 5.30 metre inflatable Super Pratone took over Piazza San Fedele in Milan, where passers-by climbed into the grass in front of a sixteenth century church. The full-size Pratone remains what it was in 1971: a seat that asks you to give up sitting properly.

Not every home has space for a meadow, and Gufram has an elegant answer to that. In 2018 it presented the Guframini, its icons reproduced at a scale of 1:8. They are made the way the originals are, from polyurethane foam injected into moulds and then finished by hand, so that each one carries the small irregularities of craft. The Guframini Pratone fits on a bookshelf and keeps every quality of the original except the ability to lie in it: the bright green, the bundled blades, the name stamped into the base.

The miniatures work best in groups, the way architects keep models of buildings they admire. The Guframini Cactus reproduces Drocco and Mello's design down to its surface, which Gufram counts at 2,165 dimples, and it comes in a small family of versions, from a deep black to a pale white. The Guframini GOD brings the TOILETPAPER collaboration onto the shelf, a cactus paired with eggs. Next to them, the mini Bocca and the mini Capitello complete a small museum of Italian Radical Design that takes up less room than a row of books.

There is something fitting about a joke that works twice. At full size, Pratone mocks the seriousness of furniture by turning it into a field. Reduced to a few centimetres, it mocks the seriousness of the collector, who places a lawn on a shelf and treats it like sculpture. Both readings would probably have pleased its authors. They wanted to change how people lived, and they chose to begin with the most ordinary thing in any room, the place where we sit down.

Images: Courtesy of Gufram. Archive image from the Gufram catalogue, 1972. Photography by Alberto Peroli, 2012. 1968, TOILETPAPER, 2013