In 1988, the young British designer Jasper Morrison took part in Designwerkstatt Berlin, a project as part of the city's programme of events during its tenure as European City of Culture. Morrison's installation "Some New Items for the Home, Part I" at the DAAD Gallery was the outcome of his three-month residency in the city. He presented a sparsely furnished room with just a few deceptively simple objects – namely, a table, three chairs, and three green glass bottles. The floor and the walls were timbered with plywood panels, and even the furniture was made using this material, with the exception of the table legs.
Today, it may seems surprising that this small and modest exhibition caused such a stir in the design world, quickly assuming legendary status. However, set against the backdrop of the formal gimmicks of Postmodernism, which became increasingly exalted in the late 1980s and were characterized by ever more frantic striving for originality, Morrison’s installation offered something refreshingly different in its pointed simplicity and restraint. The Berlin installation was read as an anti-postmodern statement, marking the start of a new simplicity in design.
About the aesthetic of the Plywood Chair, Morrison later remarked, ‘[t]he main reason the Plywood Chair looks the way it does is that I had to make it myself, and the only equipment I had was an electric jigsaw and some “ship’s curves”’. Yet in reality, a thoroughly sophisticated construction underpins the Plywood Chair’s simple form. Two intersecting pieces of timber, into which a concave curve is sawn, run under the thin plywood seat. When weight is applied, the plywood begins to sag until the timber takes the strain and stops the material from breaking. This provides a padding effect which manages to ‘compensate’, as Morrison put it, ‘for other, less accommodating features’ of the chair – for example, the fact that the backrest is actually not very comfortable.
For the Berlin exhibition Morrison produced three chairs together with Axel Kufus, one without and two with a filled-in backrest. However, Morrison described the filled-in backrest as being ‘more comfortable but less exciting’. One year after the exhibition in Berlin, Vitra began to serially produce both versions.
Text: Mathias Remmele
