In Puff! the reader finds a text that seems to be the transcription of a lecture—inserted images function as slides, while the language addresses a listening audience. The discourse focuses on the Sacco, a chair designed in 1968 by a group of Italian architects and marketed as a revolutionary object: the embodiment of a new lifestyle, disobedience of a “bourgeois” etiquette. The chair, a bag full of small polystyrene beads that let it conform to the sitter’s body, immediately proved popular and evolved into what is nowadays known in the US as a beanbag—a ‘puff’, in the author’s native Spain.

Puff! proposes a somewhat alarmist analysis of this soft object. A critique of formlessness, through which run a series of associations: from speech to fatigue, from ergonomics to labor, or from testicles to saliva.

As the sequel to Bentwood, Gabriel Pericàs continues in Puff! his scrutiny of various episodes in the history of furniture design with a speculative yet captivating methodology that transports the reader only to leave them asking: ”how did we get here?”

In spanish and english

Published by Biel Books - available through the Printed Matter website here