Chairs

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Folding Air Chair

2003

A three-piece, gas-injected polypropylene folding chair. Suitable for use outdoors.

Timeline

In the latest Air series, this time reinterpreting an old typology of folding chair, the action of folding the seat up pulls the front and back legs together by means of a fixed pivot and a sliding track. Where previously we had moulded the Air Chair and other members of the family with a combination of tubular structure and single-skinned seat and back, this time we set out to mould each of the three components as tubular structure alone. The advantage of using new technology and applying it to old typologies is that one is able to concentrate on the essential form of the object without the need to elaborate or differentiate from other existing models. For example, it is now considerably more difficult to design a wooden chair than a plastic one simply because so many angles of design approach have already been explored and a new design necessarily needs to find fresh territory to avoid repetition. New technologies and materials are rare, but they do bring about more efficient manufacturing and sometimes result in genuinely new, improved products. If one considers plastic as a by-product of oil and thus a diminishing natural resource, it is worth considering that a plastic chair represents considerably more long term value than a tank-full of petrol, and that when it reaches the end of its useful life it may either be recycled or burnt to recoup its energy potential.
Extract from Everything But the Walls by Jasper Morrison (Lars Müller Publishers, 2006)