When asked why he had selected the Air chair for the Design Museum’s 25/25 exhibition a few years back, Dieter Rams replied “I like it. Plain and simple.”
In these few precise words, Rams, who has been at the forefront of industrial and product design since the early 1950s, captured the laconic spirit of Jasper Morrison’s ascetically elegant, gas injected polypropylene chair.
Morrison began work on his stackable Air chair in 1999 when Alberto Perazza, the owner of Magis in Italy, showed him a length of tube made by gas injection, a plastic moulding technology widely in use in the car component industry. The process involves inert gas being pumped through the hollow centres of still-molten plastic inside a mould, creating enough pressure to ensure the plastic does not shrink away from the mould’s surface. The tooling is expensive, but allows for complex and aesthetically challenging forms that production runs allow for low unit costs, democratising sophisticated design by making it affordable.
My favourite thing about this chair is that everyone can afford it, and so everyone buys it. I have seen it in Cornwall coastal restaurants to Design Museum events and it takes on its surroundings with much ease… which must be why Rams likes the chair so much – much like his products they fit in with your life rather than the other way around. I love it!
You can pick up one of these wonderful chairs for approximately £94.
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