The Fauteuil 300 designed by French engineer and entrepreneur Henry Massonnet established a defining style for a particular type of chair: the affordable Monobloc, which is injection moulded as a single piece in a single step. Massonnet’s aim was to develop an all-plastic, easily stackable, weatherproof, durable, and affordable chair. The model was produced at Massonnet’s own company STAMP. Typologically, the design can be traced back to the sheet steel chairs of Joseph Mathieu from the early 1920s, which already featured the typical inverted legs. Another predecessor is Helmut Bätzner’s 1966 Bofinger Chair the production method of which, however, was more complex.
The Fauteuil 300 was not popular initially, for the first Monobloc coincided with the first oil crisis. While plastic furniture had previously pointed towards the future, it was now increasingly seen in a negative light, a result not only of increasing price of the raw material but also of a new environmental awareness. Other plastic manufacturers finally mastered the technique of injection moulding polypropylene chairs in the early 1980s and soon numerous others stormed the now rapidly expanding market with competitive prices. Forty years after the Fauteuil 300 was first launched, the Monobloc as a ‘global chair’ can now be found in galleries as well as allotment gardens, in Cambodian cafés and in front of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. It is the most widely known piece of furniture of our time.
Text: Jens Thiel
