Plastic (6 page)

During each trek across Europe in his VW, Panton brought along a pintsize model of the radical chair he'd envisioned years earlier, hoping to meet someone who was willing to underwrite its production. But for years he couldn't find a willing partner. "It is at most a sculpture, but not a chair," sniffed one furniture maker Panton approached.

It certainly didn't resemble any conventional chair. There were no arms or legs, just a long S-curve of plastic shaped like the silhouette of someone sitting. The seat was supported by a concave vault beneath it. Panton didn't invent that form; it had been pioneered decades earlier by Dutch architect Mart Stam and then popularized by Marcel Breuer, who made a cantilevered chair in chrome tubing and wood.
But his vision brought the form into the synthetic age. It would be all sinuous line and shiny surface, a double twist of body-hugging curves that could only be achieved in plastic.

But it wasn't just the shape that kept Panton doggedly making the rounds with his model. He was also captivated by the challenge of creating a chair that could be mass-produced in one step from a single piece of plastic. He got the idea from watching a plastic bucket being made by an injection-molding machine. Plastic pellets went in one end and were quickly melted into a liquid that was shot into a mold, where it was shaped and cooled. Panton was impressed by the speed of the process and by the bucket's low price. If he could make a chair in the same way, he'd accomplish a goal that designers had been chasing for generations: a chair that was literally all of a piece. Such a chair would be the perfect embodiment of the modern industrial age: a harmonious ensemble of form, material, and manufacturing technique, what designers call total design unity.

Total design unity is the ultimate ambition of the design world. It's valued on aesthetic grounds and also because it represents the most efficient way of manufacturing an object. "If you're thinking about how to get good design to the masses in a way that's affordable, single-material forms make the most sense," explained furniture historian Peter Fiell. Panton wasn't the only one caught up in that challenge. Mid-twentieth-century designers across Europe and North America were exploring ways to mass-produce plastic chairs with the new polymers available, such as fiberglass and polypropylene.

Yet, to the disappointment of Panton, technology lagged behind artistic vision. In 1957, his colleague Eero Saarinen dreamed up his famous Tulip chair. He imagined a gently curving petal of white fiberglass unfurling from a slender pedestal. (His goal was to get rid of the "slum of legs" afflicting traditional furniture.) Saarinen wanted seat and pedestal molded "
all of one thing
," as he later wrote. "All the great furniture of the past, from Tutankhamen's chair to Thomas Chippendale's, have always been a structural whole."
But there was a problem: a thin stem made of fiberglass wasn't strong enough to support a sitter's weight. So Saarinen had to settle for making the base out of metal and coating it in white plastic. The chair had the look Saarinen wanted, but he was still disappointed. He told colleagues he would keep looking forward to the day "when the plastic industry has advanced to the point where the chair will be one material, as designed."

If there were hurdles to making an all-plastic chair, designers and manufacturers, especially in Europe, were discovering ways to apply their avant-garde visions to less challenging everyday items, taking advantage of advances in both polymer engineering and plastics processing.

No one was better at this than the Italian company Kartell,
maker of the first plastic bucket, arguably the most important application of plastic ever. (When you consider how many eons humans have sought a reliable way to contain and carry water, it's no surprise that buckets are among the first plastic objects to be embraced by traditional societies.) The company was founded in 1949 by chemical engineer Giulio Castelli and his wife, Anna, an architect. They understood the need to improve plastics technology. They were continually searching for new ways to tweak polymers' properties and worked closely with machinists and molders to improve molding processes.

They started out making auto accessories but soon gravitated toward more artistic endeavors. The Castellis recognized early on that plastic materials, unlike natural ones, "acquire an identity ... only by means of the project itself."
Success hinged on the design. So they recruited topflight designers for even the most mundane objects. In Kartell's hands, flyswatters, juicers, ashtrays, lamps, and storage containers acquired an elegant beauty. A standing dustpan designed by Gino Colombini had such geometry and grace that it wound up in a number of design-museum collections.

The Castellis' genius was to take plastic at face value. Unlike so many American manufacturers, they didn't try to deploy it as a substitute for a natural material. They didn't rake it with a woodlike grain, stipple it with the pebbly texture of leather, or sprinkle it with glitter to give it the glow of gold. They let plastic be plastic. The products emerging from their Milan factory boasted bright primary colors, sleek surfaces, crisp Euclidian shapes, undulating curves. It was a style so unabashedly artificial that, as Meikle wrote, "the odor of the refinery seemed to linger" on each item.
Not everyone appreciated the look, but it was indisputably a style, one fully grounded in the slippery nature of the material. Kartell's designs made it possible for people to believe that plastic, like traditional materials, had some noble essence.

But even Kartell had trouble creating a one-piece chair. For the factory to make a full-size chair, the molds had to be massive, the machinery needed to house and press them together even more so. Some designers came close but were always stymied by the problem of those cursed four legs. Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper dreamed up a child's chair made of polyethylene for Kartell. The company could mold the back and seat all in one piece, but the legs had to be produced and attached separately. Joe Colombo hit the same wall when he designed an adult-sized chair for the company in 1967.

Panton's legless chair, however, posed fewer production challenges. It was a better fit for plastic—or at least for the state of plastics processing at the time.

The exact history of his chair is not well documented; Panton himself gave contradictory accounts of how it finally came about. What is known is that in the late '60s he finally found a partner willing to take up production of the'S chair—a Swiss company that made Herman Miller furniture under license. The company's owner wasn't wild about Panton's design, but his son, Rolf Fehlbaum, was. "It's interesting, it's new, it's exciting," Fehlbaum told his father, urging him to take it on.

The chair proved more challenging than Panton or his new partners had expected. For a few years they experimented with materials and processes,
working closely with plastics manufacturers, who were eager to participate in what they all recognized was a groundbreaking project. In 1968, they found the perfect plastic for their project: a new, glossy hard polyurethane foam made by Bayer and called Baydur. Later that year, the company began producing the seat that would go down in design history.

Sleek, sexy, and a technical first, the Panton chair, as it came to be called, was an instant success—at least in the world of design. To Panton's enduring disappointment, the chair was never a huge commercial success; it was a little too weird for the average middle-class consumer with a living room furnished in American Colonial. Nonetheless, it quickly gained status as the iconic chair of the era, the embodiment of sixties exuberance and openness to experimentation. To Mathias Remmele, who curated a museum exhibit of Panton's work, the chair captured something even deeper: "It embodies the enthusiasm of an era in which society's faith in progress and in the supremacy of technology over matter was still largely unshaken."
In this incarnation, plastic was cool. The chair graced the cover of design magazines and was recruited for ads where it could lend its sex appeal to unsexy products like dishwashers. One magazine featured a model posing provocatively with a glossy red Panton in a photo spread entitled "How to Undress in Front of Your Husband."

In the wake of the Panton chair, designers came up with even trippier concepts: Inflatable living-room sets. Seats shaped like huge molars, oversize bananas, lips, sea urchins, even a giant patch of grass. One day somewhere around 1970, my solidly midwestern mother came home with a shiny brown vinyl ottoman in the shape of a mushroom. The Panton has gone in and out of fashion. Now it's in again, rejuvenated by the mid-twentieth-century-focused furniture retailer Design Within Reach, which mass-produces the chair in great numbers using a less costly plastic, polypropylene.

Whatever the chair's status as a pop-art icon, the most important thing about it is the simple fact of its creation. As furniture historian Peter Fiell said emphatically, when that first chair fell from that massive mechanical womb, fully formed but untouched by human hands, it was "the single most important moment in the history of furniture since the dawn of civilization." (It's the sort of sweeping judgment one is allowed to make when one has written a book called
1000 Chairs.
) Panton and his partners had figured out the difficult union of form and material and manufacture. They had achieved total design unity. Or, as Fiell put it, "They'd found the holy grail."

The temptations of plastic being what they are, it was only a matter of time before that holy grail would devolve into a Dixie Cup. For, technologically speaking, it's more or less a straight line from the highbrow Panton chair to the lowbrow plastic chair that you can buy today at your local hardware store.

Plain, lightweight, and usually white or green, the monobloc chair (so called because it is molded from a single piece of plastic) may well be the most successful piece of furniture ever invented. Huge flocks of the chairs appear without fail every spring. A basic model costs about the same as a six-pack of Bud.

There are hundreds of millions of the chairs out there, populating the world's porches, poolsides, and parks. They may not show up in design spreads, but as students of the monobloc have observed, look closely, and you're bound to spot them in news stories and photos.
Kenyans rose from monoblocs to applaud when Obama's election was announced. There were monoblocs peeking out from Saddam Hussein's hidey-hole, from the prisoners' hell at Abu Ghraib, and in the horrific video of the Baghdad decapitation of American contractor Nicholas Berg (which at least one conspiracy-minded blogger took as evidence proving that the United States was somehow involved in Berg's killing).

White plastic chairs floated up in the debris of both Hurricane Katrina and the Indonesian tsunami. Photos show them at rallies in Cuba, riots in Nigeria, and Chinese celebrations of sixty years of Communist rule. They're in cafés in Israel and in the coffeehouses of its surrounding antagonists Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. They've been spotted in reclusive North Korea, where even that icon of global commerce Coca-Cola is banned.

The chairs won the world's hearts—and bottoms—because they are inexpensive, light, washable, stackable, and maintenance-free. They can weather any weather. If you don't feel like hosing the schmutz off last year's model, it's easily replaced. They're also reasonably comfortable.

Though the monobloc is descended from the Panton chair, its precise lineage is uncertain. Depending on whom you talk to, the chairs first appeared in the early or late 1970s or the early 1980s, in France or Canada or Australia. Even if the origins of the first monobloc remain obscure, it's not hard to imagine how the breed came into being. Somewhere far beyond the rarefied realm of design, probably in Europe, a utilitarian-minded businessman realized it would be possible to mass-produce plastic chairs.
He (this isn't a business with many
she
s) would employ the same injection-molding process that Panton had pioneered. But instead of using an expensive high-tech polymer as Panton had, he would deploy one of the lower-priced commodity plastics, like polypropylene. By this time, the patent on the polymer had expired, and the raw plastic could be had for less than twenty cents a pound.
Instead of using an avant-garde design like the Panton chair's, he would revert to a conventional four-legged form, which manufacturers like Kartell finally mastered following Panton's breakthrough. And rather than produce just a few thousand chairs at a time, he would make hundreds of thousands, even millions, which would allow him to recoup the large initial capital costs. Though monobloc chairs are cheap, the equipment to make them is not. An injection-molding press can cost $1 million, while the cost of a new mold can run $250,000 or more.

Indeed, this is the strategy, more or less, that was followed by the French company Allibert in 1978 when it introduced the Dangari, a single-piece plastic garden chair designed by Pierre Paulin, one of France's top furniture designers. The chair was a bestseller. It was more elegant and weighty than today's monoblocs, and it sold for a much heftier price. But at least superficially, it may have served as a model for the lightweight, less thoughtfully designed chairs that soon began flooding the world's markets.

After seeing plastic chairs at a trade show in the early 1980s, Canadian businessman Stephen Greenberg became one of the first North Americans to jump into the monobloc business. It was clear to him that the chairs offered many advantages over the metal garden furniture he was then selling. Plastic chairs wouldn't rust. They stacked easily. The design was brilliantly functional. He began importing monoblocs from France. At the time, he said, there were only a handful of companies on the scene, mostly in Europe. But over the course of the 1980s, that changed, especially after cheaper, used chair-making molds became available. Instead of having to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars to get in on the monobloc boom, a processor could get himself set up for maybe fifty thousand dollars. Suddenly it seemed like every yahoo with an injection-molding press was producing chairs. Local manufacturers began popping up all over the world—in Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand, Israel, New Zealand. Greenberg quit importing monoblocs and began manufacturing them himself. "At our height we were selling five million chairs a year. And we were just one of many. We knew guys in Italy who were producing fifty thousand a day," he told me.