Plastic (5 page)

And yet, Kramer was struck by how lamely the artists in the show had responded to that "almost Faustian freedom," at least in comparison with the industrial designers, those creative minds responsible for translating aesthetic visions into real-world applications. In his view, the designers, especially the ones dreaming up furniture, were "so evidently more relaxed, more inventive, and more inspired in the world of plastics than even the finest of the artists." Their creations were the ones that were "defining a new world of feeling for us."

Designers had been exploring that new world for decades by the time of the exhibit. Since the arrival of Bakelite, they had seen in plastics the opportunity to invent a modern aesthetic for everyday life, whether in cars, coffeepots, or chairs. In fact, especially chairs. If the comb brought plastic to the masses, the chair showed us how fabulous plastic could be.

Until recently, I never gave much thought to chairs, other than assigning vague comfort ratings to the various ones in my life. But as I've come to appreciate, it takes a lot of ingenuity to make a good chair. There's a reason the Herman Miller company reportedly spent ten million dollars developing its ergonomically exquisite Aeron office chair.

We're more intimate with chairs than with nearly any other piece of furniture. Yet the same dining-room chair in which I plant the ample bottom of my five-foot-three-inch frame also has to be able to accommodate my skinny, nearly buttless six-foot husband, my fast-growing teenage sons, and my petite preteen daughter. A chair has to support all shapes and sizes and still be reasonably comfortable. That's a tall order to fill. No other piece of furniture has so many demands placed upon it.

As a result, the chair has long been considered the Mount Everest of furniture design. Time and again, creative minds have tackled this seemingly simple item, looking for new and innovative ways to marry form and function. Design museums are filled with chairs, as are design-history books. "Both from a design standpoint and an anthropological standpoint, chairs are extremely important," said Paola Antonelli, curator of the design department at the Museum of Modern Art.

If you look back at the history of chairs, it's remarkable how consistent the fundamental form has been. The oldest known chair—a 3,400-year-old specimen unearthed from the tomb of the Egyptian queen Hetepheres (and intended to provide a good seat for whatever events awaited her in the afterlife)—would be more or less at home in a modern-day living room.
It's wide and low, with high arms and four legs ending in feet carved to look like lion's paws. That basic rectilinear form recurs through the centuries, across countries and cultures. It's a shape dictated by both the features of the seated human body and the constraints of the materials at hand, which for most of human history were wood and metal, leather and rope, and, only fairly recently, fabric.

Even with that limited vocabulary, chairs offer eloquent testimony to a culture's Zeitgeist. Consider the chairs of two very different eight­eenth-century worlds. A Louis XIV armchair—gilded, ornate, richly detailed—mirrors the pomp and politics of the Versailles court in the same way the sober, plain lines of a Shaker chair portray that sect's austere faith. The baroquely decorated armchair reflected the Sun King's glory—and only he was allowed to enjoy it; all other members of the court were forced to sit on footstools. The Shaker craftsmen deliberately avoided adornment; the only detailing was that which served a practical purpose. Their attitude toward their furnishings, as historians of Shaker architecture have noted, "was no more sentimental than their attitude toward their own flesh-and-blood bodies. It was the spirit of usefulness within that mattered, not the vessel itself."

We can see the flowering of an expansive, creative Hellenistic culture in the graceful, curving lines of the fifth-century klismos chair, and the heavy hand of feudal rule in the massive, blocky thronelike chairs of medieval Europe. The spirit of industrialization is apparent in the brilliant design of what is now the classic wooden café chair. The Thonet Model 14, as aficionados know it, was introduced in 1859 by German cabinetmaker Michael Thonet, who was determined to create a chair that could be mass-produced and sold for an affordable price. He succeeded by reducing the geometry of a good chair to half a dozen easily assembled parts: two wood circles, two sticks, a pair of bentwood arches, plus ten screws and two nuts. By 1930, fifty million had been sold, and millions more have been sold since.
The chairs of today are equally telling. Americans' obsession with ergonomic seating fairly shouts that we are an exceedingly stationary people.

But chairs are not only cultural artifacts; they have long served as artistic canvases. As industrial designer George Nelson once observed, "Every truly original idea—every innovation in design, every new application of materials, every technical innovation for furniture—seems to find its most important expression in a chair."
From the mid-twentieth century on, much of that innovation was inspired by plastics. The arrival of this chemical armada blew away many of the constraints imposed by traditional materials. Chair designers could develop ways to conform a seat to the human body beyond just a series of right angles. A chair of plastic could have many legs or, like a beanbag chair, none. It could be hard or squishy or filled with air; it could be shaped like a baseball or a baseball glove. Polymer technology permitting, the only limits were a designer's imagination.

The Greek root of the word
plastics
can be used as an adjective or a verb but not as a noun, which is probably truer to the nature of plastic than anyone imagined when the word was first coined.
For although we talk about plastic as a thing, it doesn't have the thingness, the kind of grounded organic identity, found in natural substances. Wood, stone, metal, mineral: all have innate properties that dictate how we use them and how we think about them. We know that a diamond will be hard enough to scratch glass, that a gold ring won't rust, and that a piece of ebony can be polished to a high sheen. And when we look at an object made of natural materials, we see hints of how it came into being, whether it was planed or hammered or forged or woven.

But a piece of plastic is essentially inscrutable, offering few clues as to its past or future. Though specific properties may be engineered into any given polymer, the only innate quality defining plastics as a family of materials is ... their plasticity, their protean ability to be whatever we need them to be. As the French philosopher Roland Barthes observed in a famous 1957 meditation on plastic: "the quick-change artistry of plastic is absolute: it can become buckets as well as jewels."

The arrival of such accommodating substances gave us, to the greatest extent ever, the means to shape the world to our wills and whims, our needs and dreams. The makers of Bakelite sought to drive that point home in choosing as their trademark the mathematical symbol for infinity.

Designers were enthralled by that universe of possibility from plastics' earliest days. They loved the design freedom that synthetics offered and the spirit of modernity the materials embodied—a doors-wide-open sensibility that one German critic called
Plastikoptimismus.
To furniture designer Paul T. Frankl, a material like Bakelite spoke "in the vernacular of the twentieth century ... the language of invention, of synthesis," and he urged his fellow designers to use their full imaginative powers to explore the new materials' frank artificiality.
As interpreted by Frankl and other designers working with Bakelite in the '30s and '40s, that was the language of streamlining, a lingo of curves and dashes and teardrop shapes that created a feeling of speed and motion in everyday objects from telephones to radios to martini shakers. Streamline a fountain pen and even that stolid item declared: we're hurtling toward the future here! The infinitely moldable thermoplastics that later became available offered an even broader design vocabulary.

There was another reason designers embraced plastics. From the mid-twentieth century on, modern design has been guided by an egalitarian gospel, a belief that good design needn't cost a lot of money, that even the most mundane items could be things of beauty. "Get the most of the best to the most for the least" was the way Ray and Charles Eames put it in their famous tongue-twisting credo. Plastics were the ideal medium for that mission: malleable, relatively inexpensive, and made for mass manufacture. Or as Karim Rashid, a contemporary designer renowned for his love of synthetic materials, expressed it more recently, "To create a beautiful democratic design, plastic is the best material."
The Museum of Modern Art in 1956 acknowledged plastic's contribution to the mission when it included a number of pieces of Tupperware in an exhibit of outstanding twentieth-century design. According to Alison Clarke, a historian of Tupperware, the pieces were praised for being well made and well proportioned, for their "uncluttered" and "carefully considered shapes [that were] marvelously free of the vulgarity that characterized so much household equipment."
Just as plastics had helped democratize consumer goods, they now aided in democratizing design.

Yet, as in any new relationship, there were risks. It was all too easy to exploit plastics' powers of mimicry to produce the kinds of gauche imitations—pseudo-wood cabinets and faux-leather recliners—that contributed to the growing reputation of plastic as an inferior material.
Plastics' adaptability and glibness undermined their capacity to achieve "dignity" as legitimate materials worthy of being taken seriously, one critic wrote.

This impression was exacerbated by people's unfortunate experiences with plastics in the immediate postwar years. The nascent industry had promised "test-tube marvels," but the peacetime markets were glutted with chemical mishaps. Manufacturers were still on the steep part of the learning curve, and that did not always make for happy consumers. There were plastic plates that melted in hot water, plastic toys that cracked on Christmas morning, plastic raincoats that grew clammy and fell apart in the rain.
Polymer technology improved during the 1950s as manufacturers figured out how to make better plastics and, even more important, how to match the right polymer with the right application. But the damage to plastic's reputation had been done.

The designer Charles Eames was well aware of the challenges posed by getting involved with plastics. He and his wife, Ray, had created one of the first iconic plastic chairs—the famed bucket chair—which was made from a curl of fiberglass perched atop a crisscross of thin metal legs. In a lecture to students in 1963, he talked about the differences between working with a natural substance such as granite and a synthetic material such as fiberglass. Granite, he said, is such a hard material that while it might not be easy to create something good out of it, "it is extremely difficult to do something bad.

"Plastic," he continued, "is a different matter. In this spineless material it is extraordinarily easy to do something bad—one can do any imaginable variety of bad without half trying. The material itself puts up no resistance, and whatever discipline there is, the artist must be strong enough to provide." Eames said he viewed plastic in much the same way the Aztecs viewed hard liquor—a means of self-expression too dangerously intoxicating for the young. Under Aztec law, only age and maturity earned someone the right to indulge; young adults who got drunk could be punished with death. Likewise, Eames believed that "plasticene and the airbrush should be reserved for artists over fifty."

The Danish designer Verner Panton was barely thirty when he began dreaming of plastic chairs, in the mid-1950s. He was a recent graduate of architecture school: an ambitious iconoclast with a wild imagination who refused to compromise his beliefs. During the war, he not only opposed the Nazi occupation of Denmark, he quit college to join the Danish resistance, and he spent months in hiding after weapons were found in his apartment.
After the war, he moved to Copenhagen to study architecture. He soon found his way into the city's influential design scene, making friends with several of its luminaries.

Yet he had little interest in the quiet, low-key Danish modern look that was then filling middle-class living rooms around the world. He dreaded what he called "grey-beige conformity," and he thought the color white so boring it "should be taxed." He dressed only in blue.
He was uninspired by wood and natural fibers. His mind's eye saw space-age shapes, garish hues from the far reaches of the color wheel, twisty, bendy forms that couldn't be achieved through traditional woodworking. Like many of his contemporaries, he was fascinated by the raft of new materials—steel wires, molded plywood, and, most important, plastics—surfacing in the wake of the war. Designers "should now use these materials to create objects which up to now they could only see in their dreams," he told an interviewer. "Personally I'd like to design chairs which exhaust all the technical possibilities of the present."

In fact, he already had one in mind—a radical, very unchairlike chair design he hoped to execute in plastic. But he knew he wouldn't find an audience for his vision in conservative Copenhagen, where, as one prominent designer said, "we have not bothered about anything but changing the kind of wood."

In the late 1950s, Panton bought a Volkswagen van, outfitted it as a mobile studio, and began taking periodic trips across Europe to drop in on designers and manufacturers and distributors he hoped might buy his designs. By the early '60s, he was gaining a reputation for playful imaginative designs that drew on nontraditional materials: he furnished a hotel lobby in the first inflatable plastic furniture; designed UFO-shaped lamps and walls of bubbly backlit plastic panels; created chairs from cylinders of sheet metal. He was also gaining a reputation as an enfant terrible who liked to provoke his more conventional colleagues. At a design fair in 1959 he insisted on attaching the furniture he was exhibiting to the ceiling. He thought it would give visitors a better view of the display. But his fellow exhibitors weren't amused by such attention-grabbing antics. "Many of the artists refused to speak to me for some time after," he recalled.