SHIRO KURAMATA

The designer Shiro Kuramata (1934-1991) is notably recognised for his participation in the post- modern group Memphis founded by Ettore Sottsass. In 1991, the year of his premature death, he was asked to create a bedroom destined for the Il Dolce Stilnovo della Casa exhibition in Florence.

Laputa, titled after the name of the flying island in the fantasy novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, is a double bed, for two people lying down in a line, head to head or feet against feet. This bed, with refined forms, whose design recalls hospital beds, also gives a wink to Marcel Duchamp, an artist so admired by Kuramata, and especially to his work, Apolinère Enameled, created from an advert representing a little girl painting her bed. Made from anodised aluminium, characterised by the bright colours of the bed-head, the bed conjours up, according to the words of Kuramata himself, feelings of floating, of sliding into the beyond of dreams. Created in acrylic resin, glass and aluminium, the vases for a single flower Ephemera pay homage to the Japanese tradition of flower arranging. Their linear elegance responds to the silhouette of the Laputa bed, and they are often associated with it.