What are those white plastic chairs called?

Stackable polypropylene chair

A monobloc chair

The Monobloc chair is a lightweight stackable polypropylene chair, usually white in colour, often described as the world's most common plastic chair.[1] The name comes from mono- ("one") and bloc ("block"), meaning an object forged in a single piece.

History

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Variants of the one-piece plastic chair designed by Canadian D.C. Simpson in 1946 went into production with Allibert Group and Grosfillex Group in the 1970s.[2] Other sources name the French engineer Henry Massonnet from Nurieux-Volognat with his "Fauteuil 300" from 1972 as the inventor of the monobloc.[3] They were inspired by the Chair Universal 4867 design by Joe Colombo in 1965, but no patents were filed for a monobloc chair design.[4][5] Since then, millions have been manufactured around the world.

Production and usage

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The Monobloc chair is so named because it is injection moulded from thermoplastic as one piece rather than being assembled from multiple pieces. Many variations and styles exist but all are designed to allow the chair to be made quickly and cheaply through injection molding. A common material used is thermoplastic polypropylene, with the granules being heated approximately 220 °C (428 °F), and the resulting melt injected into a mold.[6] The gate of the mould is usually located in the seat,[7] ensuring smooth flow to all parts of the tool.[citation needed][vague]

Close to a billion Monoblocs have been sold in Europe alone, with one Italian manufacturer producing over ten million a year in 2004. [8] The chairs cost approximately $3.50 to produce in 2011, making them both affordable and ubiquitous - in the billions -[9] worldwide. Numerous variants exist.[10] Their light weight and stackable design eases both their deployment and storage, even for large gatherings. [11] (One modern design weighs 2.7 kg, half that of the standard make, and can be stacked 24 high.)[12] They are also prevalent in both corporate and individual outdoor usage due to features such as the slits on seat and backrest which rain water and wind pass through, their wide base which resists their occupants tipping over, and their sheer utility and replaceability. [13]

Social reception

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The monobloc chair has been a controversial piece of furniture. Many people, including social theorist Ethan Zuckerman, have described the chair as having achieved a cultural global ubiquity]].[clarify][10] This quality has been seen as both a positive and a negative, with some considering the homogenous nature of the chair "disturbing" and "the real evil of globalization",[4][14] while others have called it one of "the world's most perfectly designed object[s]".[4]

Monobloc plastic chairs were banned from public spaces in the city of Basel, Switzerland from 2008[15] to 2017[16][17] to preserve the beauty of cityscape.

Exhibitions

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Gallery

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• Massed

• Stacked

• As former flotsam

References

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Ian Frazier, writing about the return of seals to the waters that surround New York City, offers this poetic observation about a white plastic chair:

On a higher part of the beach, a single patio chair of molded white plastic commanded a wide view. Someone might have put it there to enjoy a beer in, or for winter sunbathing. Then again, it might have been flotsam. I have seen this identical type of plastic chair in photos of the Lagos, Nigeria, city dumps in the Times. A photo of a memorial gathering for a slain Al Qaeda leader in Jordan showed a row of these same chairs in a tent. I own six of these chairs myself. I believe this type of white molded-plastic chair belongs to the growing category of the world’s ubiquitous objects.

His observation stuck with me, and I found myself searching through photos I’ve taken around the world in my travels, searching for the plastic chair. It is, indeed, ubiquitous.

Here’s my friend, Sarpei Nunoo, leaning on a particularly attractive version in a beer garden near central Accra. Some large percentage of my Ghanaian photos feature the white chair in the background, like this photo of my friend and former teacher, Bernard Woma, performing with his dancers in Nima, Accra. And they’re certainly not limited to that city. Here’s a stack of chairs, surrounded by cranes, in Arusha, Tanzania. Expand the color palette beyond white and I find examples in a dusty village in Rajastan, a quiet street in Palermo, Sicily, a roadside bar outside Jakarta.

In Abuja, Nigeria, they’re not just furniture – they’re key stage props for a dancer who balances plates, trays, tables and chairs on his body while executing full splits.

I started to think that perhaps I’d start collecting images of white plastic chairs, when I discovered that I’d been beaten to the punch… many, many times over.

There’s a Flickr group titled, “Those White Plastic Chairs” which features 930 images of white plastic chairs, taken in at least a dozen countries. (There’s a more inclusive, but slightly less impressive collection of multicolored plastic chairs on Flickr as well.)

One of the contributors to the Flickr group is Jens Thiel, from whom I learned the correct nomenclature for the chair in question. It’s a plastic Monobloc chair, named because it’s a single piece of polypropylene (mono-block), heated to to 220 degrees centigrade and extruded into a mold that can produce chairs every 70 seconds. Monoblocs are produced throughout the world, in China, Taiwan, the US, Israel, Mexico and elsewhere. At roughly $3 a piece, it’s easy to understand how they’ve become so pervasive.

Thiel maintains a website and a Facebook page dedicated to the Monobloc. The site features everything from an examination of creative ways the Monobloc is repaired in countries where it’s too expensive to replace, to numerous art pieces that feature the Monobloc. My favorite artistic interpretations include a beautifully morbid chair by pool called “souviens toi que tu vas mourir” and a fantastically subversive piece called “white billion chairs 33” by Tina Roeder. Roeder’s piece features a pile of chairs each perforated with up to 10,000 holes, rendering them beautiful but totally non-functional.

White Billion Chairs 33, Tina Roeder, detail

Artists and designers appear to have a love/hate relationship with the Monobloc. Some artists attempt to dress up the chair, melding it with other chairs, rendering it in wood, reupholstering it in leather. Others demand that we end discrimination against cheap furniture, like Martí Guixé’s Statement Chair. An art book by Arnd Friedrichs and Kerstin Finger titled “220C Virus Monobloc” sums up the tensions – it’s an object worthy of a book-length study as well as a virus, reproducing itself around the world and crowing out other designs for chairs.

I don’t have strong feelings about whether the Monobloc is an object of beauty or a target for derision… though I’d suggest that any design as successful as the Monobloc has proved its evolutionary worth. What I’m intrigued by is the idea that the Monobloc is a context-free object.

To explain what I mean:

Fifteen years ago, one of my jobs at Tripod was managing our abuse and legal teams. With several million webpages hosted on our service, some of them violated our terms of service and hosted pornography. That wasn’t a bit problem – we deleted pages that violated our TOS. But when we encountered pages that might be hosting child pornography, we had a more complicated procedure. We copied files to floppy disk (remember, it was 1996!) and mailed them to our regional FBI office, along with information on the IP address the user in question had signed up from.

One of the best guys on my team went to Boston for a week to train to become a “confidential informant”, so he could testify if we’d found evidence in a child pornography case that went to court. Curious guy that he was, he asked whether the information we were providing – the IP address signed up from – was helpful in building cases. Sure, he was told, but not as useful as the information in the photos. Almost every detail in a photo held information about the time and location the photo was taken. The shape of electrical outlets, labels on any consumer products, fabrics, clothing all were clues as to whether a photo was taken in the 1970s or last week, in Sweden or Schenectady.

Virtually every object suggests a time and place. The Monobloc is one of the few objects I can think of that is free of any specific context. Seeing a white plastic chair in a photograph offers you no clues about where or when you are. I have a hard time thinking of other objects that are equally independent of context. Asking friends to propose a similar object, most people suggest a Coke can… but I can tell you that Coke is presented very differently in different countries, in glass bottles as well as cans, with labels in local languages. The Monobloc offers no linguistic cues, no obvious signs that it’s been localized. Wherever you are, it’s at home.

For me, the Monobloc isn’t so much a glimpse of the future, where we suspect that mega-corporation will blur distinctions between Albania and Afghanistan. Even McDonalds, the avatar for global homogenization, makes heavy investments in localization. if it didn’t, it would be very hard to sell beef burgers in majority-Hindu India. It’s going to be a while before McChicken Tikka (an excellent sandwich, by the way) is so pervasive that its wrapper doesn’t reveal that you’re at an Indian McDonalds, not a Japanese one.

The Monobloc is a reminder that the world is still filled with the local, the unique, the distinctive. Globalization may be homogenizing the world, but most objects still offer some context. The few objects that defy localization deserve some special form of lionization. They’ve achieved a level of design perfection where they don’t require adaptation to be as successful in Africa as they are in suburban America. Dismiss them at your peril – context-free objects like the Monobloc have achieved a sort of global celebrity that few humans could ever hope for.