Plastic by Susan Freinkel Page A

of design magazines and was recruited for ads where it could lend its sex appeal to unsexy products like dishwashers. One magazine featured a model posing provocatively with a glossy red Panton in a photo spread entitled "How to Undress in Front of Your Husband."
    In the wake of the Panton chair, designers came up with even trippier concepts: Inflatable living-room sets. Seats shaped like huge molars, oversize bananas, lips, sea urchins, even a giant patch of grass. One day somewhere around 1970, my solidly midwestern mother came home with a shiny brown vinyl ottoman in the shape of a mushroom. The Panton has gone in and out of fashion. Now it's in again, rejuvenated by the mid-twentieth-century-focused furniture retailer Design Within Reach, which mass-produces the chair in great numbers using a less costly plastic, polypropylene.
    Whatever the chair's status as a pop-art icon, the most important thing about it is the simple fact of its creation. As furniture historian Peter Fiell said emphatically, when that first chair fell from that massive mechanical womb, fully formed but untouched by human hands, it was "the single most important moment in the history of furniture since the dawn of civilization." (It's the sort of sweeping judgment one is allowed to make when one has written a book called
1000 Chairs.
) Panton and his partners had figured out the difficult union of form and material and manufacture. They had achieved total design unity. Or, as Fiell put it, "They'd found the holy grail."
    The temptations of plastic being what they are, it was only a matter of time before that holy grail would devolve into a Dixie Cup. For, technologically speaking, it's more or less a straight line from the highbrow Panton chair to the lowbrow plastic chair that you can buy today at your local hardware store.

    Plain, lightweight, and usually white or green, the monobloc chair (so called because it is molded from a single piece of plastic) may well be the most successful piece of furniture ever invented. Huge flocks of the chairs appear without fail every spring. A basic model costs about the same as a six-pack of Bud.
    There are hundreds of millions of the chairs out there, populating the world's porches, poolsides, and parks. They may not show up in design spreads, but as students of the monobloc have observed, look closely, and you're bound to spot them in news stories and photos.Kenyans rose from monoblocs to applaud when Obama's election was announced. There were monoblocs peeking out from Saddam Hussein's hidey-hole, from the prisoners' hell at Abu Ghraib, and in the horrific video of the Baghdad decapitation of American contractor Nicholas Berg (which at least one conspiracy-minded blogger took as evidence proving that the United States was somehow involved in Berg's killing).
    White plastic chairs floated up in the debris of both Hurricane Katrina and the Indonesian tsunami. Photos show them at rallies in Cuba, riots in Nigeria, and Chinese celebrations of sixty years of Communist rule. They're in cafés in Israel and in the coffeehouses of its surrounding antagonists Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. They've been spotted in reclusive North Korea, where even that icon of global commerce Coca-Cola is banned.
    The chairs won the world's hearts—and bottoms—because they are inexpensive, light, washable, stackable, and maintenance-free. They can weather any weather. If you don't feel like hosing the schmutz off last year's model, it's easily replaced. They're also reasonably comfortable.
    Though the monobloc is descended from the Panton chair, its precise lineage is uncertain. Depending on whom you talk to, the chairs first appeared in the early or late 1970s or the early 1980s, in France or Canada or Australia. Even if the origins of the first monobloc remain obscure, it's not hard to imagine how the breed came into being. Somewhere far beyond the rarefied realm of design, probably in Europe, a utilitarian-minded businessman