Melding structure,
logic, and comfort.
The Chair One Family
Love to Build
German designer Konstantin Grcic loves designing things even more than he loves building things—and he has always loved building things. Put those two disciplines together and sprinkle liberally with his own definition of his style—current, feasible, and realistic—and you have the man who designed one of the most inventive chairs ever created—Chair_One.
Die-Casting
In starting the project, Grcic decided to create a deliberately “strange” form in die-cast aluminum, a new material for him and for Magis. “There wasn’t really a briefing for the project,” he says. “I had this great project and was also naïve enough, being quite young—I just went all the way. I thought working with die-cast aluminum would mean making the whole chair in die-cast aluminum. I mean, you think of the Aluminum Group by Eames.”
It was a bold move, using die-cast aluminum to form the structure of a chair—it had never been done before. “Maybe now, in retrospect it was quite the bold gesture to design the whole seat shell as one aluminum casting, but as I said, maybe I was naïve. I didn’t think how bold that was,” he says.
Flat Planes
So how did he end up with the final design, which left the public “kind of stunned” when they first saw it? “In a way, the material gave me a kind of direction. I thought, I need to break surfaces up into lines, or just thin structures or branches,” he says. “I had this idea that we could break a seat shell down into pure structure, taking away all of the surfaces, taking away all the material that is not absolutely necessary and creating a very three-dimensional object that combined structure with comfort.”
Grcic wanted Chair_One to be more open space than solid, so he modeled it on a soccer ball—a collection of small, flat planes assembled at angles to create a three-dimensional form.
And then he went seriously to work. “We just worked on models, endless models, one-to-one scale models we made from cardboard, aluminum sheets, laser cuts, metal sheets, just—you know—a very kind of hands-on method of building the structure, bit by bit, millimeter by millimeter. So for me, the chair, in the end, had a real logic. It had to be this way at the end of that journey, that process. It had a logic of structure and a logic of form.”
In a way, the material gave me
a kind of direction.
- Konstantin Grcic
Public Reaction
It took him four years to find that logic.
“I’m really proud that we actually made it!” he says. “It was a process more complex and bigger and more difficult than anything we had done before, and it was very pioneering. It was certainly a turning point for me because, having done this chair, I knew we could do so many more things.” He says that since completing Chair_One and Stool_One, he has been interested in the complexity of work.
When the chair was introduced, the public had never seen anything like it. Some observers called it the “Darth Vader chair.” “They didn’t believe it was a chair one could actually sit on,” he says. “But each one of the branches forms part of the structural form and forms part of what you sit on, and it becomes part of the comfort of the chair.”
It was a process more complex and bigger
and more difficult than anything we had
done before.
- Konstantin Grcic
Comfort
So the chair is really comfortable? “People try it and it’s nice psychologically that a chair that looks uncomfortable is, in the end, comfortable—and feels even more comfortable than it actually is. So people are positively surprised, unlike a chair that looks comfortable but isn’t.
“And now people think it’s a very iconic chair, very recognizable.” Iconic, indeed. Chair_One is included in the permanent collections of major museums all over the world, including MoMA in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
“People declare it as a style—that the chair has a certain style,” he says. “But for me, it was never a style issue. It was always just a very pragmatic and pure process that led us to do what we did.”
