What Pierre Paulin brought home from India in 1970

In 1970 Pierre Paulin travelled through India and Japan and spent the trip watching how people actually sit — on carpets, on mats, on the floor, with the furniture doing far less work than a French salon expects of it. What he drew afterwards was not a chair at all. The Tapis-siège is a 302 by 295 cm floor plan of PVC-coated canvas, plywood and wool carpet whose four corner panels swing up on piano hinges to become backrests, so that a room can be re-seated by folding it rather than by moving anything. The designer gave the piece to the Centre Pompidou in 2003, where it is catalogued under his name.

Indian projects meet a different side of the same mind in the Osaka sofa of 1967, reissued by laCividina: straight and curved modules that let a lobby follow the building instead of lining up against a wall. Indian hotel and corporate schemes are configured by La Mercanti either as one long curve or as a whole landscape of seating.