Panton Chair ^{± 1957-1967 (this exemplar ± 1971-1979)}

Verner Panton was the first designer to make a plastic chair out of a single element. He managed to do so by challenging the idea that a chair needs individual legs and instead applied an ingenious S -shape. Panton Chair became an icon of the new organic formal idiom that was made possible by the rise of plastic in the 1950s. The optimization of the design took a lot of time: between Panton’s earliest sketches and the first serial production, almost ten years elapsed. Even after that, the chair underwent some crucial adaptations. In the 1970s, for instance, the backs of the chair’s knees were reinforced with ribs, as can be seen on this copy. There were also four phases in terms of the materials used: first fibreglass-reinforced polyester (a material perfected by the American designer duo Charles and Ray Eames), then ASA plastic, ­followed by polyurethane, and lastly polypropylene.

SOURCES

Dimensions of design: 100 classical seats, Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, 1997, pp. 69-71;
Susan Freinkel, Plastic: a toxic love story, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2011, pp. 34-40.