Archived entries for robin day

Robin Day’s polystool

Designed in 1972 by Robin Day for the education market, the e-series polypropylene range of chairs and stools uses the same principles as his classic polypropylene chair; a low cost, mass production piece of furniture. It shows extreme strength and durability making it ubiquitous in educational establishments.

Hille polystool robin day

Although and odd choice for the home, given its purpose was for science labs the world over, I have had a fondness for this simple stool for some time. First seeing it used as a bar stool in a London apartment, adorned with a yellow plastic seat to tweak the well-known dull grey that we saw at school, this stool is chameleon-like in its ability to blend in to its surroundings.

Even the takeaway establishment ‘The Japanese Canteen’ uses these stools with their interior as they stack super-easy and are utilitarian in their design making them practical, yet in my opinion, quite stylish!

Between £15-£20 each, these are cheap too. It makes Ikea hang its head in shame that a stool designed almost 40 years ago is still in production, still in use and one of the most famous stools known to us now.


Courtesy of Robin Day for Pallant House Gallery

A new exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery, which opens tomorrow, draws from the collection of H Kirk Brown III and Jill A Wiltse in Denver, USA, and guest-curated by Shanna Shelby to focus on the furniture designs of Robin Day and textile designs of his wife Lucienne and will fittingly be held in Chichester, the Days’ home town.

If you get an opportunity to be in Chichester between 26 March and 26 June 2011, do head to the Pallant House Gallery for this momentous exhibition.

More information can be found at www.pallant.org.uk.

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RIP Robin Day, genius of design

British furniture designer Robin Day passed away on 9 November 2010 at the grand old age of 95. He was – and will continue to be – an inspiration to many other furniture designers.

Lucienne and Robin Day: Textiles and furniture in holy matrimony
© Michael Venning / National Portrait Gallery, London

Born in High Wycombe, he graduated from the Royal College of Art in interior and furniture design. Best known for his mass-produced, injection-moulded polypropylene stacking chair, Robin and his wife Lucienne Day were pioneers of British design after World War II.

Since creating the polyprop chair in 1963, more than 20 million chairs have been produced in forty countries around the world. Wow! The chair was also adopted by every school across the UK thanks to its stackable design and cheap production, all due to the innovative use of the wonderful new materials that became widely available during the 1960s.

Polypropylene stacking chair by Robin Day

He was quoted as saying “Commerce is against morality. Morality is going to lose every time” and “magazines and advertising are flogging the idea that you have to keep changing things and get something new. I think that’s balls – evil. But obviously that’s your livelihood” he was never a fan of ‘fashion’ in design much like some of the greatest designers in the world, but realised that the strongest way to say this was through his timeless designs.

A retrospective of Robin and Lucienne Day’s work will appear at the Pallant House Gallery from 26 March to 26 June 2011.

Now sit back and watch this great 10-minute film: Contemporary Days: The Designs of Lucienne & Robin Day from Design Onscreen:

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RIP Lucienne Day

Lucienne Day was the foremost British textile designer of her period. Day’s furnishing fabrics, of which the most famous was the Festival of Britain abstract pattern Calyx, hung in every “contemporary” living room in Britain. The reality of “art for the people”, dreamed about by the Victorian William Morris, was finally achieved by a female designer in the middle of the 20th century.

Désirée Lucienne Day RDI (née Conradi) (January 5, 1917 to January 30, 2010), was born in Coulsdon, Surrey, England. Inspired by abstract art, she pioneered the use of bright, optimistic, abstract patterns in post-War England, and eventually grew celebrated worldwide.

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The textile designer Lucienne Day in 1952

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Calyx, the fabric design that brought her fame

Day was daughter of an English mother and a Belgian father who worked as an insurance broker. She attended convent school in Worthing, and at 17 enrolled in the Croydon School of Art, where she discovered a love of printed textiles. Later she attended the Royal College of Art, where she was a top student.

Through her career, Day won many awards, including the International Design Award of the American Institute of Decorators in 1952, and the Gran Premio prize at the Milan Triennale in 1954. In 1962, she was made a Royal Designer for Industry (RDI), an award which honours designers who have achieved “sustained excellence in aesthetic and efficient design for industry.” She was the fifth woman to be made an RDI.

She believed that good design should be affordable, and in 2003 told the Scotsman newspaper that she had been “very interested in modern painting although I didn’t want to be a painter. I put my inspiration from painting into my textiles, partly, because I suppose I was very practical. I still am. I wanted the work I was doing to be seen by people and be used by people. They had been starved of interesting things for their homes in the war years, either textiles or furniture.”

lucienne_day.jpg

An exhibition of Lucienne Day’s textiles and her designer-husband Robin Day‘s furniture, ‘Robin and Lucienne Day: Design and the Modern Interior’, will be at the Pallant House Gallery from 26 March to 26 June 2011 in Chichester – the city where the Days retired in 2000, in order to be closer to their Sussex cottage, where Day spent much of her time in the garden.

Read the Guardian obituary on Lucienne Day

Read more about Lucienne and Robin Day at mydeco.com

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