Chairs to make you sit up and take notice

Verner Panton was one of the most exciting and innovative furnishers of the 1960s. Today, the Danish designer and architect is best known for a single object: the Panton chair.

Created in 1967 and still in production, it was the first piece of furniture that could be made as a single piece of molded plastic - a manufacturer's dream come true. It was cheap, stackable and comfortable.

With its organic curves, Playskool colors and unabashedly synthetic material, it was sexy, fun and new. It embodied the decade in the West, a time when economic prosperity allowed many to follow the playful desires of the child within.

The Panton chair, together with another 100 chairs of diverse shapes, is now on display in Beijing.

The spirit of time, novelty and fantasy runs through the exhibition called A Hundred Years - A Hundred Chairs, organized by the Vitra Design Museum in Germany at the Seasons Place Shopping Center in Beijing's Financial Street.

As one of the biggest and most important collections of modern furniture design, the Vitra Design Museum is bringing the exhibition to China for the first time, offering the opportunity to get close to the museum's most beautiful pieces.

From the curved wooden furniture popular in the 1890s, to the development of new types of plastics that gave rise to a wealth of creative fantasy in the 1960s, this show examines the important role technology, politics and culture have played in industrial furniture design.

The exhibition presents chairs by Verner Panton, Ron Arad, Charles Rennie Machintosh, Charles and Ray Eames, Philippe Starck, and Frank O. Gehry, and details each design era. These chairs reflect changes in human thought.

"It all began in the latter half of the 19th century with curved wooden furniture, which lent itself to mass production," says Alexander von Vegesack, director of Vitra Design Museum, who is in Beijing for the exhibition's opening. "Design played a significant role in cultural development at the beginning of the 20th century."

According to Vegesack, Gerrit Rietveld designed furniture with simple lines, while Marcel Breuer created the first tubular steel chairs. This light shape was subsequently a source of inspiration for Alvar Aalto, who was the first to use plywood, and for Jean Prouve, who started to use techniques and materials that had previously only been used by the aeronautical industry.

"Like any revolutionary design, many experiments with new materials were not welcomed by the market. But it was those venturous designs that become milestones in designing history," he says.

In Vegesack's eyes, the chair is as important as daily clothing, so well-designed chairs improve one's quality of life. He hopes Chinese youngsters, especially designers, will visit exhibition.

Professor Ma Gang of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, who brought his students over to the exhibition, said: "Those valuable chair designs are live lessons for my students who are the future of Chinese design."

Drawings, sketches and documents belonging to the Vitra Design Museum accompany the chairs on display. Visitors are given precise details of the pieces on show, which are exhibited in specially designed interiors evoking the historical context in which they were created.

The show is running until May 4.

(China Daily 04/08/2008 page19)