Chair Today, Gone Tomorrow

“The most hated chair in the world“; “The Vitra Design Museum celebrates an absurdity“: these were the headlines under which the critics of major newspapers discussed an exhibition on the Monobloc plastic chair, I curated in Weil am Rhein in 2017.

Many visitors were astonished to find a cheap plastic garden chair being honoured in the home of design, a place where they expected to find furniture classics by Ray and Charles Eames or Le Corbusier.

Such reactions highlight how much design and everyday objects can polarise opinion. In truth, the aim of the exhibition was to show that even this seemingly anonymous, cheap chair has its own complex design history.

Since the start of the 20th century, designers have been working to produce furniture in a single piece - first with plywood, then from sheet metal. In the 1960s, new plastic technologies yielded successes such as the Bofinger chair made of polyester. French engineer Henry Massonnet achieved a breakthrough in 1972 with the first archetype of the Monobloc, the “Fauteuil 300“ which was made of polypropylene and took less than two minutes to produce.

Efficiency in production, radical cost reduction and versatility of use - these are the elements which make this “absurdity” a design icon. The Monobloc is also distinctive because it realises a long-held modernist ideal: making design affordable for the masses, or even better, democratising it.

 In his book “Vers une architecture“ (1927), Le Corbusier promoted the principle of mass production and standardisation of high-quality design so that people from the working classes could also afford good design. Ray and Charles Eames, the American design stars of the post-war period, coined the saying, “the best for the most for the least“.

There is a certain irony in the fact that their furniture, and that of their like-minded contemporaries, has long since become an expensive, bourgeois status symbol, found in glossy magazines and exclusive furniture shops, but not in the homes of the working classes.

“Today, a Monobloc often costs less than a bottle of shampoo, but hardly survives more than a couple of winters.”

In contrast, the Monobloc is lightweight, stackable, weatherproof, and extremely affordable, a truly democratic piece of furniture. It is also the most widely used chair in the world. In 2019, 1.1 million units were sold in India alone, making the Monobloc perhaps the first fully globalised piece of furniture.

Interestingly, the Monobloc is perceived very differently, depending on its environment. For many critics, especially in the west, it’s an example of how a vision of democratising furniture production to appeal to consumer-driven throwaway culture has turned into an on-going ecological nightmare.

Cities such as Freiburg and Basel have gone as far as banning the Monobloc from public spaces and it’s considered by many to be cheap and tacky. In some respects, the Monobloc is representative of the final stages of the rationalisation of mass production.

To save on materials, holes have been made in the backrest and cheaper materials have been mixed into the polypropylene, which make the chair brittle and unstable. Today, a Monobloc often costs less than a bottle of shampoo, but hardly survives more than a couple of winters.

Descriptions such as “fast-food design“ or the “most soulless chair“ are difficult to reconcile with the status of a design icon. In richer countries, the Monobloc can be used as a kind of design underdog, used to demarcate the boundaries in terms of status between privileged and less privileged social classes in a subtle but nonetheless highly legible manner.

This is a kind of “aesthetic discrimination“, which according to design historian Penny Sparke only appears to operate on a personal level, but is actually collectively negotiated and enforced by those who have cultural and economic influence.

For many people in poorer countries, however, the Monobloc is simply the only piece of brand-new furniture which is affordable. In the Monobloc exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum, we showed what significance these chairs can have and how they are sometimes treated as objects of value.

 In Thailand, Monoblocs are often locked to a tree with a chain, or two broken Monoblocs might be stacked on top of each other in order to have one whole chair again. In India, broken parts are mended.

In Hauke Wendler's documentary film “Monobloc“ from 2022, we see a woman from Uganda with polio who is able to move independently outside her home for the first time thanks to a wheelchair made with a Monobloc seat which was designed and distributed as part of a large wheelchair donation project.

“In Africa, the Monobloc is not a joke,“ says one of the project’s participants. When it comes to helping underprivileged people with basic needs or those in emergencies, the plastic Monobloc chair plays a more important role internationally than any other piece of seating.

It is these contradictions which make the Monobloc a symbol of the complexity of contemporary material culture. It also shows how material, cultural and ideological factors can intertwine when categorising certain products.

“In 2019, 1.1 million units were sold in India alone, making the Monobloc perhaps the first fully globalised piece of furniture.”

Depending on context and on location, extremely different, even contradictory meanings can be attributed to products. Take the so-called “Kitchen Debate“ of 1959 which broke out between US President Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev, then leader of the Soviet Union, during the American National Exhibition in Moscow.

The two heads of state discussed the merits of communism and capitalism, respectively, while looking at a model American kitchen on display. Nixon emphasised how much modern automatic household appliances, which were universally affordable thanks to capitalism, contributed to increased leisure time, freedom and a better life overall.

Khrushchev objected that these things were an expression of a certain decadence, an “empty promise to satisfy supposed social needs“, as design historian Jane Pavitt put it. As far as the Monobloc chair is concerned, it is precisely because almost everyone knows it and has sat on one, that the gap between rich and poor countries can be recognised.

The contempt with which some in the global North hold the chair indicates that they suffer the somewhat luxury problem of having to define themselves through consumption and design. In places where people are struggling to fulfil their material needs, there is simply no room for artificial needs, created only in order to be just as artificially satisfied. Plastic furniture is appreciated and gratefully received.

Where people cannot afford new chairs other than the Monobloc, it’s not a disposable product or an absurdity, but a piece of furniture on which people can sit with dignity.