The Blow chair was the first industrially produced and commercially successful inflatable chair. It was developed by Jonathan De Pas, Donato D’Urbino and Paolo Lomazzi in collaboration with Carla Scolari in 1967. They drew direct conceptual, technical, and formal inspiration from pneumatic architectural structures such as Frei Otto’s inflatable pavilion for the 1958 garden festival in Rotterdam as well as from inflatable rubber boats. The transparent material PVC, which was important for the expressive quality of the object, represented a challenge as, unlike the neoprene used for rubber boats, it cannot be glued; finally, thermo-bonding was identified as a way of welding the plastics, and production began.
The chair was first presented at the Milan Furniture Fair in 1968 and received enthusiastically. Soon after, it was sold deflated and folded in a package equipped with an air pump and a repair kit. It cost about twenty US dollars and was sold in tens of thousands, but after a few years production stopped due to technical problems with the welding. Production was reinstated in 1989. Unfortunately the ageing process of the PVC frequently led to leaks. The Blow was reflecting a changing lifestyle. Revolutionary ideas of an informal, flexible and dynamic house had swept away traditional ideas of domesticity. The Blow perfectly embodies the spirit of that time and therefore became an icon of the 1960s.
Text: Julia Selzer
