Sit well with plastics
A dinner plate does not have to be round, a clock does not need hands, and chairs don’t need four legs. No, not the broken chair that you spot at the curbside with a missing leg waiting for the garbage truck... We are talking chairs that don’t have the conventional four-legged design but are nonetheless super comfortable.
Design Classics made of plastics
The idea is not that new. It came from the Danish designer and architect Verner Panton who created the “Panton” chair. He was fascinated by the possibilities of plastics, which back then were new. Plastics gave him complete design freedom both in terms of shapes and colors. What made this chair so unusual for its time was not only its sophisticated design but also the fact that it was made of a single piece of plastic.
Panton Chair
The polyurethanes (PU) developed and produced by Bayer were the ideal material for this technically ambitious design. Why ambitious? Well, in conventional chairs the weight is absorbed equally by the legs with the proper dimensions. If the legs are missing, like in the Panton chair, the back legs, the weight must be distributed by integrating suitable reinforcements, otherwise sitting becomes a shaky affair. In order to produce the chair from one single mold, a plastic had to be selected that would allow for complex shapes of varying thickness.
To protect the surface of the chair from scratches and wear and tear, it was finished with a colored coating, either glossy or matte. The Panton chair achieved cult status, and it has even made it to the 21st century, right into the heart of the current revival of the 1960s. Since Verner Panton’s stroke of genius, designers have used the versatile polymer PU to realize their creative ideas.