Drawings and photographic material, Medio Oriente, sofa 中東（沙發）繪圖及影像資料

This armchair design consists of a single-piece seat and back sandwiched between a pair of bulbous end pieces that serve as arm. With its camouflage-patterned upholstery, stitched to evoke the caterpillar treads on army tanks and heavy vehicles, the Medio Oriente chair—whose name means ‘Middle East’ in Italian—was the designer’s response to the region’s military conflicts in the early 1970s. Umeda produced this design during the years he worked in Milan in the studio of the prominent Italian designer Ettore Sottsass. Its low-slung form and rejection of many traditional features of seat furniture—wood joinery, loose cushions, and the distinct articulation of constituent parts like legs and arms—point to the radical rethinking of design, and its political dimensions, in the post-war decades.



This series contains a set of sketches of the armchair, moving from conceptual towards more finalised; design drawings; and photographs depicting how the object progressed from concept to production.