blerd, writer, foodie, weeb trash, She/her or they/them. I suck at tagging and reblog willy nilly. Message me anytime, I'm always willing to chat with people.
I'm obsessed with this chair. The artist takes a flimsy hunk of injection-molded plastic that's been cost-cut to hell and back, and insists that we look at it with fresh eyes and understand its beauty. And they went about it in the most labor-intensive way I can think of.
Absolutely nothing about this design is convenient to execute in wood. Every piece is curved, most have compound curves. This is artisan craftsmanship: it's inherently slow, manual, and skilled. Notice, also, that most features of this chair must be thicker and heavier than on the plastic chairs being imitated. Injection-molded chairs can be produced in this shape in a matter of minutes with far less material at very low cost.
If these flowing, organic curves are so beautiful in polished wood, perhaps they are also beautiful in the mass-produced chairs that are far more accessible. Perhaps we should remember to admire designs that succeed enough to become ubiquitous. I don't know about you, but I'll never see injection-molded chairs the same way again.
I agree with all of this, but YOU HAVE HIT UPON A FORGOTTEN TRUTH OF PLASTIC CHAIRS!!!!!
The standard one-piece injection molded plastic chair is referred to as a "Monobloc", literally just describing it as a single piece. The history of this chair is fascinating, and it all starts back in 1946, with the D.C. Simpson Monobloc.
Douglas Colborne Simpson was an architect mostly active in the 40's and 50's, designing a lot of classic mid-century style buildings in Vancouver, Canada(1). In 1946, as part of a government project to find new uses for materials developed for WWII, he and engineer James Donahue developed the design you see above, simply called the Monobloc(2). Unfortunately, we don't know a lot about this chair as it was only ever a prototype, and no modern examples have survived, nor have most of the records surrounding it(3). To my knowledge, we don't actually know if this was technically injection molded, or crafted some other way. We can't even be sure if it was technically the inspiration for the designs that followed, but no matter the case it has lent its name to the entire genre.
Plastics technology was simply not what it is today back in the 1940's. Most people would have had very little plastic in their homes, most likely just a few pieces of Bakelite (the first commercially viable plastic, made from a formaldehyde based resin in a Bakelizer, the best name for any industrial manufacturing equipment ever). Over the following few decades, however, as a wider variety of plastics were both developed and came down in price to the point of commercial viability, the concept of the plastic chair was revisited, and the first folks to revisit it were Helmut Batzner, in 1964, and Joe Colombo, in 1965.
This, is the Bofinger chair, Batzner's design:
The elements of D.C.Simpson's Monobloc were pretty alien compared to todays mass-manufactured plastic chairs, but here we start to see some more modern elements come into play. The first thing you probably notice is the front legs, which have that characteristic visible 90 degree bend in them for added rigidity, plus a much more comfortably leaned back and slightly scoop-shaped seat. We also see much more support in the back rest, with broad triangles allowing for a more efficient use of materials without losing back support.
Similar to Simpson, Batzner was not an industrial designer, but an architect, and this chair had a very specific purpose. Batzner and his team designed it as part of a project to build a new theater in Karlsruhe, Germany, which required a large amount of additional seating which could be easily packed away into storage or distributed around the theaters rooms by the staff (4). As such, it was designed to be both lightweight and stackable, so several of them could be moved by one person, and they could be stored compactly. This piece of furniture was a huge hit a the theater, and was so popular that 120,000 units would ultimately be manufactured and sold around the world, with each one taking just 5 minutes to produce (4).
Around the same time, Joe Colombo enters the scene with this:
Colombo was an artist in several mediums who, after taking over his families appliance company in the 50's, made the shift towards architecture and interior design, and started designing a wide array of trend-setting furniture(5). The chair shown above is known as the Universale (sometimes referred to as the Chair Universal 4867), designed in 1965. This chair differs pretty greatly from the ones that came after it, it many ways it represents a different path that could have been taken, but it's also very widely referenced as an inspiration for what is broadly considered the origin of the white plastic chair the world over.
Enter: the Fauteuil 300
This is, arguably, the first iteration of the white plastic chair we all know today. Designed by Henry Massonnet in 1972, the Fauteuil 300 and it's imitators are, collectively, the single most widely used piece of furniture in the entire world(6). Before that, however, it was something else entirely: works of art.
What might be hard to recognize in hindsight is that all of these chairs described so far were not everyday objects. They were on the forefront of modern design, they made use of brand new materials and manufacturing processes, and at the time they were each made, they were slick, stylish, and fairly expensive. Despite the speed at which they could be manufactured, these innovative, high-end chairs rose sharply in cost up through the early 1980's due to the sheer demand for them. They weren't cheap spare seating you stuck in the garage, they were placed at dining tables and on fine patios, and they were a wildly popular talking point. That's not to say their expense justified their artistic value, but rather that their expense and popularity was a product of their status as highly contemporary and boundary-pushing designs.
With the price of plastics declining after the 70's, the increasing accessibility of injection molding to manufacturers, and the widespread popularity of these designs, copycats proliferated rapidly, and eventually drove the price down. This era, in the 80's and 90's, is when these chairs became cheap an ubiquitous, and where they became manufactured the world over.
And here is where we reach this piece, "Plastic chair in wood", by Maarten Baas, and a piece of the history I've left out so far. The Monobloc was designed to be made out of wood. Like the the other chairs designed by Joe Colombo, like the chairs that predated the Simpson, the Monobloc was designed with the intention of using laminated plywood, but as the artists and designers behind them began to experiment with new materials they fell in love with the idea of making them from plastic, and so they did. They redesigned and redesigned until they made something that would be impossible to make in wood at a price most people could afford, but which could be made from plastic in mere minutes. The organic curves and thin profiles would take so much time, so much waste material, so much skill and effort to create if made of wood that they could never be furniture, they could only be art. Baas' chair is a perfect, beautiful reflection of that.
That, in brief, is the history of the design of the white plastic Monobloc chair, but it's not all there is to know. In fact, it's kind of just the start. I've linked my sources below, but I would strongly recommend checking out the German documentary Monobloc, by Hauke Wendler. It goes over the history, but it's far more interested with what the Monobloc means, and what it's place is in our world today. The impact it's made, the better and the worse, and what it says about us. It's fascinating, and well worth your time.
i feel like a lot of fandoms pride themselves on being gayer than the source material but have they considered being less racist and less misogynistic than the source material as well . could be revolutionary
Nothing on earth will be funnier to me than that clip of a former boys planet contestant saying "oh and everyone on boys planet was gay btw" and all the zerose being like "omg I can't believe you'd say that, ur outing people or spreading false rumours u shouldn't say stuff like that!!1!11!!1" and all the Evols going "oh yeah we know"
look, yes, of course a pond will kill you. A little-L lake will kill you, if you are careless enough, but they are lazy things, pitcher plant predators, and they do not hunger. The Great Lakes remember when they were the blistering endless winter and the slow crush of ice reshaping the land. They remember the implacable starvation of an unbreaking cold across the continent, and they carry that ancient ice water in their bellies, hungry still. Lake Superior wears her winter boldly, and she will wrench frigid breath from your lungs in the heat of August and pull you, unrotting, to her depths. Huron beckons you further and further from shore with such a gentle slope, so easy, until you are finally chest-deep in the water but you cannot see the shore anymore, only the endless expanse of her. Erie sends her fogs like snowfall, whiteout blizzards, blinding you to her rocky shallow basin, reaching up to claw the belly of boats. Lake Michigan pretends, charming, a child's ocean, and her longshore tides creep along her beaches and tear away anyone foolish enough to believe the clear blue lie of her docility, most lethal of all.
The Great Lakes aren't haunted. No matter what anyone says, the Lakes aren't haunted. They are the memory-eaters, the old dark painted over with charming blue, and what sinks does not rise, not even the dead. When the Lake raises goosebumps, it isn't the bodies in the depths. It's just the Lake, reminding you that you are mostly water and water calls to its own.
The oceans, the old saltwater womb, warn you with every breaker that they are dangerous. The oceans never let you forget that you crawled from their hold, with your saltwater veins, but not all of your ancestors did, and there are things beneath the ocean tides, waiting with teeth to spill the blood you stole. The oceans with their shawls of hurricanes, their steady beating, make it impossible to forget the threat of them.
But the Great Lakes? The Lakes will lie to you. The Lakes will not gift you the buoyancy of saltwater, will tempt you with still surfaces and cool drinkable freshwater. The Lakes will promise that there is nothing with teeth waiting below, as though the Lake itself is not the maw of something hungry. The Lakes are new to the world, in the scale of epochs, and they play games. They lap at your knees like they are tamed, but if you swim long enough there will be a moment where the Lake throws you sideways, pulls you under, and you remember that this is a wild thing, with teeth of ice and nothing but water in its belly. They hold the last breath of every foolish swimmer that lowered their guard for a second too long, and the carcasses of centuries of shipwrecks, and they do not surrender what they take. No, the Lakes are not haunted. The Lakes are not cursed. There is no monster waiting in the depths, only the depths themselves, and that is enough.
They say that freshwater doesn't lay quiet in its bed until it's had its measure of blood, and the Great Lakes are thrashing at their shorelines.
Oh, my darlings, bodies and shipwrecks and memories are not the only things the Great Lakes devour--seasons, too, the Lakes cling to. All summer long the Lakes hold tight to the chill of winter, scattering cool breezes off their shoulders onto the coast. All summer long the Lakes hoard heat, storing it down in the deep thermal reservoir of fresh water, the golden heart of sunlight tucked away for the dark winter months. All summer long the Lakes steal warmth from the air and store it away, and when the sharp northern winds bring winter, the Lakes breathe out the last ghost of summer and fling themselves skyward. When the air is freezing, the Lakes have held fast the deep battery of summer, and the warm memory of July evaporates from the water and crystallizes in the atmosphere as January snow. All summer long the Lakes trade in winter winds, and all winter they shake out the white storm coat of summer.
at the risk of being cringe with everything going on — this week, the last six months, the past five years — i keep thinking about that one quote from the great gatsby
“they were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
To my recollection, for a long time Ides of March meming on Tumblr was confined to the day itself. You'd log in on the 15th and your dash would be all Julius Caesar memes and be like ohh it's the Ides of March today, ok!
Over time it has expanded & last year was the first time I became aware of substantial pre-gaming. The Ides of March has been a big annual meme on Tumblr for years but it being preceded by 2 full weeks of people getting hyped up is pretty recent.
There's also recently been an element of hmm almost roleplaying to it? Various newer posts circulating with people pretending like they're personally gonna stab Caesar.
Anyway that's what this meme is in reference to!! thank you 👍
#it's so commercialized these days #time was you'd never start celebrating ides of march before MAR/10 (mario day) #now they start playing ides of march carols in february
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