Mezzadro Stool

Overview

Mezzadro is a stool designed by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni in 1957 and put into production by Zanotta in 1970. It assembles a lacquered sheet-metal seat in the shape of a tractor seat, a cantilevered chromed steel stem and a beech footrest into one springy, sculptural seat. Zanotta lists it among its furnishing accessories as model 220.

Construction

• Stem: chromium-plated steel, bent into a cantilever that gives the seat its spring
• Seat: lacquered sheet metal, perforated, in orange, red, yellow, white or black
• Footrest: steam-treated beech, natural colour, set across the base as a crosspiece
• Fixing: the seat is attached to the stem with a wing-nut pin

Specifications

• Model: Mezzadro 220
• Dimensions: W 49 × D 51 × H 51 cm (Zanotta data sheet)
• Year of design: 1957 · In production at Zanotta since: 1970

Villa Olmo, 1957

Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni designed the "springy metal seat" in 1957, together with the Sella seat, for the exhibition "Shapes and colours in today's homes" (Forme e colori nella casa d'oggi) at Villa Olmo in Como. Zanotta put it into production in 1970 under the metaphorical name Mezzadro, Italian for sharecropper — a homage to the farm world its seat comes from.

A ready-made of four worlds

Zanotta describes the stool as a loud message of freedom in defining domestic space, recalling Neo Vanguardism, the provocation of Arte Povera and the irony of Pop Art. Like a work by Duchamp, it holds together craft and industrial components: the farming world in the sheet-metal seat and the steel crossbow, the cycling world in the fixing pin and the nautical world in the beech crosspiece.