The world's most common chair costs a few dollars and has no clear inventor.
The white plastic Monobloc is squirted into a mould as a single piece of molten polypropylene. Billions have been made, at around 3.50 dollars each. It is loved as perfect design and loathed as the evil of globalisation. The Swiss city of Basel banned it from public spaces for nine years.
Monobloc means 'one block': the chair is injection moulded from thermoplastic in a single piece, with no joints or assembly. Polypropylene granules are heated to around 220°C and the melt is forced into a mould, usually through a gate in the seat so it flows evenly into every leg and slat. The whole design is optimised for making chairs fast and cheaply.
Who invented it is murky. A one-piece plastic chair designed by the Canadian Douglas C. Simpson in 1946 led to variants made by French firms in the 1970s. Other accounts credit the French engineer Henry Massonnet and his Fauteuil 300 of 1972. Designer chairs like Joe Colombo's 1965 Universal chair and Vico Magistretti's 1967 Selene came first, but nobody patented the monobloc chair as such, which is part of why it could spread so freely.
And spread it did. Around a billion have been sold in Europe alone, and billions worldwide. In 2011 one cost about 3.50 dollars to make. It is light, stacks high, sheds rain through slits in the seat and back, and resists tipping thanks to its wide stance. In much of the developing world it can be made locally and is sometimes a household's first modern furniture; people have even converted them into wheelchairs.
That ubiquity divides opinion. Some critics call its sameness disturbing, 'the real evil of globalization'; others call it one of the world's most perfectly designed objects. Basel banned Monoblocs from public spaces from 2008 to 2017 to protect the look of the city, while the Vitra Design Museum gave it its own exhibition in 2017, and MoMA has featured it too.
Source: Wikipedia — Monobloc (chair) · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
