Plastic (7 page)

With that kind of volume, the field became viciously cutthroat. Producers kept ratcheting down the price, creating impossibly thin profit margins. While the earliest monoblocs sold for fifty or sixty dollars, by the mid-1990s, they cost a tenth of that. "Eventually a lot of people just put themselves out of business," recalled Greenberg. It was a "sort of suicide." The same story played out in the United States, where intense competition eventually winnowed the number of manufacturers down from the dozen or so in the mid-1980s to the three still making monobloc chairs today.

If you walk into your local hardware store and buy a plastic chair, chances are it was made by Grosfillex, a French veteran of the plastic-furniture business that has a factory in Pennsylvania; U.S. Leisure, the American subsidiary of a huge Israeli plastics conglomerate; or Adams Manufacturing, a privately held company in Portersville, Pennsylvania, a tiny town north of Pittsburgh, with a population of 268. Bill Adams, the founder of Adams Manufacturing, was a relative latecomer to the plastic-chair business, diving into it in the late 1990s. Because of the brutal economics of plastic chairs, his family considered the decision so financially risky that his wife eventually divorced him over it, and his son left the company for several years. Still, Adams had no regrets. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing better he could do for the world than make plastic furniture.

As you'd expect, most plastics manufacturers are gung ho about their products. But for pure and uncomplicated devotion to Team Polymer, few of them could match Adams, as I discovered when I visited him. "Plastic is so much better than anything else!" he exclaimed in a typical riff. "You can do so much with it. It's so efficient. And it's so clean." His deep and dedicated plastiphilia evoked the unalloyed enthusiasm of the mid-twentieth century. No amount of bad press could shake his conviction that "plastic is just a good thing." When I mentioned growing public concern over litter from plastic bags, he asked skeptically, "Did you see any plastic bags on your way up here?" In all his years vacationing on the Maryland shore, he said, he never once saw plastic trash on the beach, so he didn't believe plastic debris in the ocean posed a problem. Like plastic itself, his faith in polymers was not easily broken down.

Adams was tall and balding with the heavy-lidded, avuncular look of the actor Bert Lahr (the lion in
The Wizard of Oz
). In his sixties when I interviewed him, Adams remembered precisely when he fell for plastic: he was twelve years old, and someone gave him one of those little change purses that you have to flex to open. It was made of vinyl. "I said, 'That's the most amazing thing I've ever seen. This is absolutely beautiful stuff.'"

Still, it was a long, circuitous road from early crush to true commitment. In the late 1970s, Adams was working as a children's librarian but itching to do something different. A born entrepreneur and inventor, he had come up with "this gizmo" that he thought could solve soaring heating bills: bubble wrap attached by thumbtacks to suction cups, a contraption that could seal windows and prevent heat from escaping. Using retirement savings and a modest inheritance, Adams began trying to peddle the gizmo. He met little success until one day he passed by a gas station where duct tape had been used to hang a bunch of signs in the windows.
It's going to take a lot of work to scrape all that tape off,
he thought to himself.
If they just had my suction cups
... He stepped inside and had barely begun his spiel before the store manager stopped him and said he'd take two boxes. The next day he visited more gas stations and came home with his wallet stuffed full of dollar bills. Soon, he was taking his suction cup-thumbtack combo to hardware stores all across the Mid-Atlantic region. "People were using them for everything, every time they had something to hang up," he recalled. The proverbial light bulb went on: "I realized no one in the world was taking suction cups seriously. So I started taking suction cups seriously." He bought new equipment, learned how to make suction cups faster and better, and branched out into new suction-cupping opportunities, such as systems for hanging Christmas wreaths and lights. Before long, he had filed more than a hundred and fifty suction-cup-related patents; he'd become America's suction-cup king.

After several years, Adams began to worry that his suction-cup business was too seasonal; he wanted to diversify into products that would keep his factory busy year-round. He heard about a guy going out of business who was selling molds to make folding plastic tables. Adams decided to buy them. Later, he expanded the line with folding chairs and stools. He landed major sales contracts with Walmart, Kmart, and hardware stores. Soon he was wearing a new crown: the world's largest maker of folding plastic furniture. Then he realized there was an even larger empire to conquer: monobloc plastic chairs.

Telling his story, Adams made it sound as if he stumbled from one fortuitous situation to another. Yet given the unforgiving economics of the plastic-chair business, he was obviously a very shrewd businessman. For in just a few years, Adams rose to become one of the country's top producers of monobloc chairs, supplying big-box stores and hardware chains across much of the eastern United States. By the time I met him, in 2008—four years into the business—he was turning out close to three million chairs a year.

Touring Adams's factory and cavernous warehouses with him, I could see that his pride in his product was not just a nine-to-five show. He truly saw the plastic chair as a thing of beauty, a marvel of utility. Indeed, he had furnished his kitchen and dining room with the plastic chairs and tables that he made. He chose his sage green Mission model, which resembled Mission-style furniture only insofar as the chair had straight back spokes. "I just love plastic furniture," he said earnestly. "There's an elegance to it. If you go back in the history of furniture, to its very beginning, there is nothing that combines chemistry and physics and mechanics and design and style the way [plastic] furniture does."

Adams was not alone in his admiration of the monobloc. In 2001, Jens Thiel, a German management consultant and design buff, started a website devoted to the chair. It has registered as many as thirty thousand hits a month. (It also links to several photo-sharing websites where enthusiasts post pictures of monobloc chairs from around the world.) Thiel got interested in the monobloc when he noticed people were sitting in them at a high-end art show and was struck by the incongruity. Thiel didn't try to defend the chair aesthetically, but he appreciated its simple functionality: "I like them. I find them very practical. I have six monoblocs at my dining-room table."

While the industry has become concentrated in the hands of large corporations in the United States and Europe, elsewhere in the world monoblocs are the products of local enterprises. Around the globe there are an estimated one hundred manufacturers turning out at least five hundred variations on the basic form.
I use the word
variations
loosely. There are differences in color—Asian and Latin American countries love bright, vividly colored chairs—and in superficial decorations. Still, producers the world over rarely stray far from the essential design. Given the vast possibilities presented by plastics, I wondered why.

"Ultimately it comes down to price" was the succinct explanation offered by George Lemieux, an Indiana-based consultant who spent more than twenty-five years in the plastics industry, much of it in plastic furniture. The design of monoblocs is largely the result of a series of price calculations driven by consumer demand: how to achieve "the most safe and stable geometry" with the minimum amount of material. There have to be several slats in the back to ensure the chair doesn't buckle when someone leans against it. The legs are splayed at precisely determined angles to prevent them from collapsing outward or folding inward. Corners are curved because that adds a measure of strength. The seat is at least three-sixteenths of an inch thick because that is the minimum thickness needed to support 225 pounds, the benchmark weight of industry standards.
In short, the chair is precisely engineered to deliver the safest stable seat for the lowest price—and nothing more.

The economics of monoblocs are so tight, it's difficult to modify the design with anything more than superficial flourishes. For instance, a model that Adams custom-produced for Kmart had a panel of embossed roses across the back. It was profoundly ugly—even cheaper-looking than the basic monobloc, perhaps because the roses truly had nothing to do with the chair's overall design.

Years ago, when Lemieux worked for the chair maker U.S. Leisure, he hired a designer to bring a new look to some of the company's chairs. The innovations seem absurdly minor, but the way they were received is telling. For instance, they tried to introduce a "Southwestern" chair. "It had some unique designs," Lemieux remembered, "little stars and half-moon shapes and different things like that in the back which gave it a southwesterny look. And then we put some flecking in [the plastic] so that it would sparkle like sandstone. It was a nice look."

But one that was quickly crushed in the intensely competitive plastic-furniture market. The chairs sold for $9.99, which according to Lemieux was about two dollars more than consumers were willing to pay for a plastic chair. His company quickly retired the model.

Plastic schlock is not, of course, what Panton and Saarinen and other pioneers of plastic design had in mind when they set out to create a mass-produced plastic chair, a throne for the common man.
Yet schlock becomes virtually inevitable when the ethic animating the higher goal is stripped away. Take out the design ethic—not just the aesthetic sense, but the sense of purpose—and all that's left is mass-manufacturability. The result is chair as simple commodity. Useful, affordable, but as soulless as a traffic cone.

Yes, a plastic chair could be anything its producer wanted it to be. But for it to survive the demands of a modern market, the thing it most needed to be was cheap. Manufacturers delivered cheap plastic chairs, therefore consumers expected cheap plastic chairs, therefore manufacturers delivered cheap plastic chairs. It's a pattern—some might say a vicious circle—that makes the plastics-design revolution look more like a commercial putsch. Today's flood of cheap, disposable products mocks early utopian hopes that plastics would fulfill all our wants and needs. Instead of feeling fulfilled, we now often feel choked by an empty abundance.

Today, monoblocs are seen as irredeemably tacky, the emblem of a Walmartized world. A design-minded friend of mine who was planning a party had a nightmare that her husband had filled their house with white monobloc chairs. She woke up in a sweat.
Washington Post
writer Hank Stuever summed up the scorn of many when he wrote: "The resin stacking chair is the Tupperware container of a lard-rumped universe."

I asked various design experts why monoblocs are so widely reviled, and their answers bordered on the metaphysical. "It's almost as if one can feel the cheap thought in the product," said the Panton chair maker Rolf Fehlbaum, now CEO of Vitra Design. It suggests "a moral minimum: how can you make it as cheap as possible so it lasts a few years and then you throw it away." You know, he added, "in the city of Basel, [Switzerland,] where I live, there is a law that you may not use them in outdoor cafés. For the simple reason that they are an offense to the public."

The problem with the monobloc chair is not that it's ugly or anony­mously made or extremely low cost, said MOMA curator Antonelli. "It's something ethical. It's made with lesser materials. It's not meant to last. It's a wasteful object." Earlier in her career, she worked with Giulio Castelli, the founder of Kartell. No one was a bigger booster of plastic furniture than he was. Over the years, she recalled with a laugh, "He assembled a collection of really, really ugly plastic chairs. To him they were so interesting because they showed how a material and its possibilities can bring out the best and the worst in people."

Despite all the bad furniture made from plastic, many designers still share their mid-twentieth-century predecessors' conviction that there are boundless possibilities to make something good. In recent years, the design world has been buzzing about the MYTO, a plastic chair designed by Konstantin Grcic and unveiled in 2007, not at a forum for design or furniture but at the plastic industry's biggest trade show, the triennial K Show in Düsseldorf. The choice was a nod to the chair's roots: the chemical manufacturer BASF had asked Grcic to come up with a design to promote its new ultrastrong polymer Ultradur.
Grcic reached back to the Panton for inspiration and, working with BASF engineers, created the first plastic cantilever chair since the debut of that design icon. Grcic's take on that form is a hip, supple, springy zigzag of plastic with a perforated seat and back that Grcic hoped would evoke an animal's skin. It's so lithe it makes the Panton look stodgy. Thanks to BASF's new polymer and advances in processing technology, the chair has "an elegance that wasn't possible before," the MOMA's Antonelli said.

Photos of the MYTO have been posted on design blogs worldwide. The
New York Times
hailed it as one of the best ideas of 2007, the Museum of Modern Art added it to its permanent collection, and it was prominently displayed in a show about Grcic put on by the Art Institute of Chicago.
Times
design critic Alice Rawsthorn praised the MYTO for its "coolly angular shape" and for using "the minimum material possible." In this instance, that single shot of plastic is now a sign of eco-responsibility.
In other words, the MYTO may be a monobloc, but it's one imbued with an ethic and intentionality that elevate it far above the $6.49 plastic patio chair. Grcic is just one of many contemporary designers enraptured by the possibilities of plastic. Kartell continues to be a major outlet for those designers' work. On a sunny spring afternoon, I went to visit the Kartell store in San Francisco, one of a hundred retail outlets the company has established in cities around the world.