Technological know-how
meets total comfort.
The Air Family
A Plastic Chair That Competes
The Air Family—Air-Chair, Folding Air-Chair, and Air-Table—all began with a length of plastic tubing and designer Jasper Morrison’s desire to create affordable plastic furniture that would look good, be comfortable, and wear well. The tubing was handed to Morrison by Magis founder Eugenio Perazza. It was a sample of a plastic he wanted to use to make a chair with a new molding technology called gas injection.
Air-Chair was the first single-shell chair created with the new technology, which numerous other companies started using soon after Air-Chair was introduced. “The goal [for Air-Chair] was to make a one-piece plastic chair which could compete with any other everyday chair. I designed it thinking of the shape an ideal wooden chair would be if it were possible to carve it.”
The technical development was
considerably more complicated than
the design development.
- Jasper Morrison
Air Molded
Morrison insists that “the technical development was considerably more complicated than the design development.” The process is complicated, but in simple terms, a mold is created for the plastic, and gas is injected into it, forming the single piece of plastic into the desired shape. Morrison described it this way: “Imagine blowing up a balloon inside a shoebox.” You’d end up with an oblong balloon. The gas presses the plastic against the mold, leaving a hollow core. So gas injection technology allows for the molding of forms that could not be molded before this technology existed. If you look at the places on the chair or table where you would normally find seams, all you see is smooth surfaces.
“With each chair designed, one gets a better sense of what makes a comfortable seat, and with this one, I think we succeeded in delivering a combination of angles and curves which combine to give a high level of comfort to the long-term occupant,” Morrison explains.
What makes gas injection-molded furniture better than your average plastic furniture? The kind you pick up at your local big-box hardware store? “It’s a big shift in quality for a one-piece plastic chair,” Morrison says of his Air-Chair. “Prior to the gas injection technology, plastic furniture had to be strengthened with unpleasant ribs and single-wall thicknesses. Gas Injection allows continuous smooth surfaces. The tubular form is visible as if a thin skin had been draped over the chair frame.”
The Air-Chairs and Air-Table are lightweight but extremely sturdy as a result of how the technology forms them, and all these pieces are fully recyclable.
