Now I Sit Me Down (28 page)

The fabrication process for a monobloc chair is entirely automated and takes place inside a large machine the size of a tour bus. About five pounds of plastic pellets are mixed with hardener, dye, and other additives, heated to 430°F, and the molten material is injected into a mold under extremely high pressure. After being cooled, the two-piece mold opens and a robot arm removes the completed chair; no finishing or handwork is required. The whole process, from pellets to completed chair, takes less than a minute. Since the raw material is relatively inexpensive, the production cost is extremely low.

The chief investment for a monobloc chair manufacturer, other than the injection-molding machine itself, is the precision mold. To pay for the mold it is necessary to produce hundreds of thousands of identical chairs (no variation is possible except color). Over time the mold loses accuracy and must be replaced. Secondhand molds are sold to less demanding producers in the Third World, and thus the monobloc chair has spread around the globe. A Flickr website called “Those White Plastic Chairs” contains more than a thousand images: solitary chairs and chairs massed in groups, chairs in towns and chairs on the beach, chairs left on snowy city streets to reserve parking spaces. There are photographs of plastic chairs occupied by the faithful at the Wailing Wall, ebola patients in a Liberian clinic, and tired American marines in Iraq. The images include plastic chairs converted into low-cost wheelchairs, and broken chairs with jury-rigged metal legs. Plastic chairs are everywhere—on a condominium balcony in Vancouver, in a Venetian trattoria, a sidewalk eatery in Phnom Penh, an outdoor barbershop in Lagos, or a favela in Rio. Monoblocs are the furniture equivalent of rubber flip-flops.

The global monobloc represents the culmination of the dream of a universal mass-produced chair that began with Thonet and was pursued by the Bauhaus designers. With its absence of details—no joints, as Morrison pointed out—it fulfills Charles Eames's criterion for a chair that “would have in its appearance the essence of the method that produced it.” The monobloc is light, portable, stackable, waterproof, easy to clean, and, of course, extremely cheap. We have seen how, over the years, chairs have been affected by changes in production: the shift from carpentry to cabinetmaking, from workshop to factory, and from factory to assembly line. Automated plastic injection goes one step further, turning the chair into a mass-market commodity.

Despite its huge success—it is undoubtedly the most common chair on the planet—the monobloc has not enjoyed the social acceptance of rubber sandals; it is more likely to be reviled or, at least, ignored. A deck chair on the beach is charming; a plastic chair on the beach is an intrusive piece of flotsam. Most people find plastic chairs tacky. That's undoubtedly the reason that the City of New York provides Parisian folding chairs rather than monoblocs in Bryant Park and in the pedestrianized parts of Broadway.
5
The black polyurethane chairs in the Seattle Central Library are stylish in a way that monobloc chairs could never hope to be. Of course, the Seattle library chairs cost about seven hundred dollars each. The low price of the monobloc precludes any sense of status—this is just a cheap throwaway. When Le Corbusier furnished his interiors with Thonet café chairs in the 1920s, he was being provocative, placing a commercial product in a residential setting. But since the ubiquitous monobloc is already at home everywhere, a monobloc in the living room has all the cachet of a plastic dairy crate.

The monobloc has another disadvantage—at least as far as the design world is concerned. Ever since the 1920s, advances in chair design have been linked to individuals: Breuer, Aalto, the Eameses, Saarinen, Jacobsen, Rowland. The cantilever chair, the butterfly chair, the beanbag chair, even the recliner, have a design pedigree. The monobloc, on the other hand, is a renegade. Although mass-produced, it is a throwback to anonymous chairs like the Windsor and the rocker. Like them, it simply appeared, not out of the folkish blue, but out of a global industrial murk.

Unlike the Windsor chair, however, the generic monobloc is definitely not a paragon of design. The shiny plastic finish is unpleasant to the touch, sticky to sit on for any length of time, and its color fades in sunlight. At five pounds, the chair is too light. It's all very well for a folding lawn chair to be light—that is the trade-off we accept for its portability—but we expect a stationary chair to feel more substantial. In addition, the thin unreinforced plastic is weak. Flexibility in a chair is not a bad thing—it can actually add to comfort—but the cheapest monoblocs are notoriously frail. “The chairs seem very flimsy, the back rails bend when you lean against the back. They feel unstable,” reads a typical online customer complaint. “The chairs are so weak, I am afraid to let my guests sit in them,” reads another. A chair should lend the sitter a measure of dignity, but the monobloc is an object of ridicule. “The Tupperware container of a lard-rumped universe,” a
Washington Post
reporter called it. If a chair is a symbol of civilization, as Ralph Caplan claimed, then the monobloc is a sad reflection of a global consumer society that is oblivious of the past, aims for the lowest common denominator, and is little concerned with long-term quality.

What would a well-made, well-designed monobloc look like? One of the first designers to turn his attention to this question was Jasper Morrison (no relation), a British industrial designer. Morrison's low-key approach to design tends to favor subtle improvements over radically new forms. This is evident in the chairs he has designed. A beechwood dining chair, for example, looks like something from a Thonet catalog of the 1930s, until you realize that the seat and backrest are not laminated wood but plastic—more flexible than wood. A café chair recalls a traditional woven-cane brasserie chair, except that the seat is molded from reclaimed wood and plastic. He describes a metal-and-plastic stacking chair as a “descendant” of the 40/4. Evidently, Morrison is prepared to learn from the past. This attitude is unusual among contemporary designers and reminds me of Kaare Klint's axiom: “All the problems are not new, and several of them have been solved before.”

Morrison's monobloc, called the Air-Chair, is so low-key it is almost banal. With four unbraced tubular legs, a tubular frame, and a solid seat and back, the chair resembles a child's drawing of a chair. Some designers give plastic chairs paper-thin profiles; not Morrison—his side chair is distinctly chunky, with squarish proportions and rounded edges. The plastic has a matte, slightly textured finish and comes in eight colors: black, white, several pastel hues, a cheerful orange, and a rather alarming fuchsia. Unlike beechwood and woven cane, plastic is not inherently attractive, yet Morrison manages to tease something pleasing out of this unpromising material. An oblong carry handle cut into the seat reminds me of Wagner's Postsparkasse stool and doubles as a drain when the chair is left outside. The shaped seat is comfortable and the chair feels rock solid. The plastic is reinforced with fiberglass, which makes it stronger, and there is more material—this chair is twice as heavy as a generic monobloc. Yet when I lift it, perhaps because it is so sturdy, it feels surprisingly light.

Air-Chair (Jasper Morrison)

The Air-Chair has a curious quality for a designer chair—it doesn't draw attention to itself. In that sense, it's more like an everyday object such as a push broom or a clay flower pot. Such artifacts, as Morrison has observed, are neither handmade nor unique, and their designers are unknown. Yet they have a curious kind of authority. This is also true of well-designed industrial products. When we look at a circular Honeywell thermostat, we don't think, “Oh yes, Henry Dreyfuss designed that,” we simply want to adjust the room temperature, and the familiar, self-explanatory dial helps us to do the job. When we want to sit down, we pull up an Air-Chair and it does its job, too.

Morrison's monobloc costs more than a standard plastic patio chair. “The price of a monobloc chair depends on the technology used and the volume of production,” he explained in an e-mail. “The cheaper variety are made in millions and tend to be single-wall moldings with reinforcement ribs, while the more expensive (usually designer versions) tend to make use of a technology called gas injection (hence the name Air-Chair), which blows the plastic against the mold in areas where the sections need to be tubular for structural reasons, creating something like a bone structure of hollowed-out tubes. The molding is more complicated and the mold cost is higher, the cycle time is longer, the chairs use more plastic but are much stronger.” The Air-Chair, which was designed in 1999, was one of the first monoblocs to use the new technology. Its homogenous tubular structure wouldn't make sense with any other manufacturing technique.

The stacking Air-Chair was intended for outdoor use on café terraces, but is handsome enough to be used indoors as library and cafeteria seating, or even as a dining chair at home—unexpected settings for a plastic chair. Like its throwaway monobloc cousin, it is yet another addition to the chair universe. There is surely room for an everyday chair that can be used indoors and out, that is not a precious artifact, and that will give years of service. Not that plastic chairs will replace the other kind. If history teaches anything, it is that the chair is never merely—or only—a tool for sitting. The rightness of a chair for its job is only one of its many indefinable pleasures, and the variety of these pleasures precludes a single solution. Remember Voltaire's necessity of frills.

The future of the chair probably lies somewhere between the ergonomic task chair and the improved gas-injected monobloc. That is, between a chair that can adapt to the widest possible range of postures and body sizes, and an inexpensive chair for the masses. Yet that future is uncertain, because chair design is not a science. Important discoveries are made and forgotten. Lumbar support was invented by the Chinese and informed chairmaking in Georgian England, yet the early modernist designers chose to ignore this feature in favor of straight backs and right-angled geometry. Sprung upholstery can be a great aid to sitting comfort, yet it has fallen out of favor in recent years. We spend a lot of time in adjustable chairs—in cars and on planes—but with the exception of the much-maligned recliner, we rarely use adjustable chairs at home. Currently, the mesh task chair represents the most advanced solution to healthful sitting, yet domestic furniture has generally resisted incorporating similar ergonomic features.

This is hardly the end of the story. A hundred years from now we'll no doubt be using plastic chairs of some sort, but we'll still have Adirondack chairs at the cottage—or whatever we will call our country hideaways. We'll also be sitting on as-yet-unimagined chairs made out of as-yet-unimagined materials. Chairs will likely accompany space colonists on their travels. They may be some sort of inflatable contraptions, or simply aluminum lawn chairs. The chair endures, even as it never ceases to change.

 

NOTES

1. A Tool for Sitting

1. 1
   . In modern French,
   déjeuner
   refers to luncheon, but in eighteenth-century France it meant breakfast—as it still does in French Canada today. Boucher's painting is sometimes called
   Family Taking Breakfast
   , or—mistakenly—
   Morning Coffee
   .
   

2. 2
   . The statue stands today on the campus of Drexel University, of which the financier was founder.
   

3. 3
   . This kind of pelvic support is unique and does not reappear until the late nineteenth century—in the tractor seat.
   

4. 4
   . The ottoman is part of a family of low padded furniture that includes poufs, tuffets, and hassocks, which can be used interchangeably as low seats or footstools.
   

2. If You Sit on It, Can It Still Be Art?

1. 1
   . By comparison, Jefferson's library, considered one of the largest in the new United States, consisted of about 6,500 books.
   

2. 2
   . The doorway was surmounted by a Latin quote from Virgil: “God has given us this ease.”
   

3. Sitting Up

1. 1
   . India, where many people who sit on the floor use beds, is an exception.
   

2. 2
   . The brick
   kang
   and the wooden
   kang
   have a similar-sounding name but are written differently. The ideograph for the former signifies “fire,” while that for the latter signifies “box.”
   

3. 3
   . Modern Japanese homes have Western-style (
   yōshitsu
   ) rooms with sitting furniture, but they also often include a separate
   washitsu
   , or traditional room, with tatami mats for sitting on the floor.
   

4. 4
   . A lounge chair can be as low as fourteen inches, compared with eighteen inches for a typical side chair.