Plastic Page 5

  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 shes) 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.

  With that kind of volume, the field became viciously cutthroat. Producers kept ratcheting down the price, creating impossibly thin profit margins. While the earliest monoblocs sold for fifty or sixty dollars, by the mid-1990s, they cost a tenth of that. "Eventually a lot of people just put themselves out of business," recalled Greenberg. It was a "sort of suicide." The same story played out in the United States, where intense competition eventually winnowed the number of manufacturers down from the dozen or so in the mid-1980s to the three still making monobloc chairs today.

  If you walk into your local hardware store and buy a plastic chair, chances are it was made by Grosfillex, a French veteran of the plastic-furniture business that has a factory in Pennsylvania; U.S. Leisure, the American subsidiary of a huge Israeli plastics conglomerate; or Adams Manufacturing, a privately held company in Portersville, Pennsylvania, a tiny town north of Pittsburgh, with a population of 268. Bill Adams, the founder of Adams Manufacturing, was a relative latecomer to the plastic-chair business, diving into it in the late 1990s. Because of the brutal economics of plastic chairs, his family considered the decision so financially risky that his wife eventually divorced him over it, and his son left the company for several years. Still, Adams had no regrets. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing better he could do for the world than make plastic furniture.

  As you'd expect, most plastics manufacturers are gung ho about their products. But for pure and uncomplicated devotion to Team Polymer, few of them could match Adams, as I discovered when I visited him. "Plastic is so much better than anything else!" he exclaimed in a typical riff. "You can do so much with it. It's so efficient. And it's so clean." His deep and dedicated plastiphilia evoked the unalloyed enthusiasm of the mid-twentieth century. No amount of bad press could shake his conviction that "plastic is just a good thing." When I mentioned growing public concern over litter from plastic bags, he asked skeptically, "Did you see any plastic bags on your way up here?" In all his years vacationing on the Maryland shore, he said, he never once saw plastic trash on the beach, so he didn't believe plastic debris in the ocean posed a problem. Like plastic itself, his faith in polymers was not easily broken down.

  Adams was tall and balding with the heavy-lidded, avuncular look of the actor Bert Lahr (the lion in The Wizard of Oz). In his sixties when I interviewed him, Adams remembered precisely when he fell for plastic: he was twelve years old, and someone gave him one of those little change purses that you have to flex to open. It was made of vinyl. "I said, 'That's the most amazing thing I've ever seen. This is absolutely beautiful stuff.'"

  Still, it was a long, circuitous road from early crush to true commitment. In the late 1970s, Adams was working as a children's librarian but itching to do something different. A born entrepreneur and inventor, he had come up with "this gizmo" that he thought could solve soaring heating bills: bubble wrap attached by thumbtacks to suction cups, a contraption that could seal windows and prevent heat from escaping. Using retirement savings and a modest inheritance, Adams began trying to peddle the gizmo. He met little success until one day he passed by a gas station where duct tape had been used to hang a bunch of signs in the windows. It's going to take a lot of work to scrape all that tape off, he thought to himself. If they just had my suction cups ... He stepped inside and had barely begun his spiel before the store manager stopped him and said he'd take two boxes. The next day he visited more gas stations and came home with his wallet stuffed full of dollar bills. Soon, he was taking his suction cup-thumbtack combo to hardware stores all across the Mid-Atlantic region. "People were using them for everything, every time they had something to hang up," he recalled. The proverbial light bulb went on: "I realized no one in the world was taking suction cups seriously. So I started taking suction cups seriously." He bought new equipment, learned how to make suction cups faster and better, and branched out into new suction-cupping opportunities, such as systems for hanging Christmas wreaths and lights. Before long, he had filed more than a hundred and fifty suction-cup-related patents; he'd become America's suction-cup king.

  After several years, Adams began to worry that his suction-cup business was too seasonal; he wanted to diversify into products that would keep his factory busy year-round. He heard about a guy going out of business who was selling molds to make folding plastic tables. Adams decided to buy them. Later, he expanded the line with folding chairs and stools. He landed major sales contracts with Walmart, Kmart, and hardware stores. Soon he was wearing a new crown: the world's largest maker of folding plastic furniture. Then he realized there was an even larger empire to conquer: monobloc plastic chairs.

  Telling his story, Adams made it sound as if he stumbled from one fortuitous situation to another. Yet given the unforgiving economics of the plastic-chair business, he was obviously a very shrewd businessman. For in just a few years, Adams rose to become one of the country's top producers of monobloc chairs, supplying big-box stores and hardware chains across much of the eastern United States. By the time I met him, in 2008—four years into the business—he was turning out close to three million chairs a year.

  Touring Adams's factory and cavernous warehouses with him, I could see that his pride in his product was not just a nine-to-five show. He truly saw the plastic chair as a thing of beauty, a marvel of utilit
y. Indeed, he had furnished his kitchen and dining room with the plastic chairs and tables that he made. He chose his sage green Mission model, which resembled Mission-style furniture only insofar as the chair had straight back spokes. "I just love plastic furniture," he said earnestly. "There's an elegance to it. If you go back in the history of furniture, to its very beginning, there is nothing that combines chemistry and physics and mechanics and design and style the way [plastic] furniture does."

  Adams was not alone in his admiration of the monobloc. In 2001, Jens Thiel, a German management consultant and design buff, started a website devoted to the chair. It has registered as many as thirty thousand hits a month. (It also links to several photo-sharing websites where enthusiasts post pictures of monobloc chairs from around the world.) Thiel got interested in the monobloc when he noticed people were sitting in them at a high-end art show and was struck by the incongruity. Thiel didn't try to defend the chair aesthetically, but he appreciated its simple functionality: "I like them. I find them very practical. I have six monoblocs at my dining-room table."

  While the industry has become concentrated in the hands of large corporations in the United States and Europe, elsewhere in the world monoblocs are the products of local enterprises. Around the globe there are an estimated one hundred manufacturers turning out at least five hundred variations on the basic form. I use the word variations loosely. There are differences in color—Asian and Latin American countries love bright, vividly colored chairs—and in superficial decorations. Still, producers the world over rarely stray far from the essential design. Given the vast possibilities presented by plastics, I wondered why.

  "Ultimately it comes down to price" was the succinct explanation offered by George Lemieux, an Indiana-based consultant who spent more than twenty-five years in the plastics industry, much of it in plastic furniture. The design of monoblocs is largely the result of a series of price calculations driven by consumer demand: how to achieve "the most safe and stable geometry" with the minimum amount of material. There have to be several slats in the back to ensure the chair doesn't buckle when someone leans against it. The legs are splayed at precisely determined angles to prevent them from collapsing outward or folding inward. Corners are curved because that adds a measure of strength. The seat is at least three-sixteenths of an inch thick because that is the minimum thickness needed to support 225 pounds, the benchmark weight of industry standards. In short, the chair is precisely engineered to deliver the safest stable seat for the lowest price—and nothing more.