It’s Elemental
Bertjan Pot’s Carbon Chair for Moooi puts carbon fiber to
innovative use.
By Kristi Cameron
June 2004
Bertjan Pot is making a name for himself as a designer with an aptitude
for combining resin and fibers. And he’s doing it on the doorstep of
Marcel Wanders, the man who designed 1996’s Knotted Chair, which
also used resin and fiber to memorable effect. Wanders was quick to pick
up Pot’s Random Light in 2002 for the Moooi collection. That
sublimely simple piece randomly wraps fiberglass around a balloon to form
an airy globe. In a perfect union of production and function, the
balloon is removed through the hole that is used for changing the
lightbulb. With the Carbon Chair, Pot (in collaboration with Wanders)
takes the technique a step further, playing on the strength of carbon
fiber to create an incredibly slender base as well as a shell seat that
recalls the Eameses’ innovative work in fiberglass. The Carbon Chair
debuted in April at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan.
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The chairs are made in a factory in the Philippines that normally
produces rattan. Most people don’t think about it, but it’s
handmade—hand-coiled and handwoven. The people at these factories
are very good at working with weaving techniques and furniture, so
it’s almost obvious to have them do the furniture. Resin is
something new for them. I’ve just been there for two weeks to train
them on how to deal with plastics. We also had to see how they could
reproduce the mold, which was flown in from Holland. I made it here then
took it there and showed them how to do it. Now there is only one mold,
and they can only make two chairs a day. They are probably going to have
a small line set up—maybe 10 molds.
The end result of the Carbon Chair is different from but much better
than the chair Marcel saw. First I made the Carbon Copy, which was a
carbon-fiber copy of a plastic chair by Charles Eames. Marcel saw it and
said he would like it for Moooi. We discussed it for two or three
months, and I did some more experiments of what it could be. It was a
very rough sketch of a Charles Eames chair, which was not really
suitable for the large scale Moooi wanted to produce it in.
Marcel Wanders and I were in the same competition—the Material Fund
Prize—in 2003. It’s a competition for Dutch people to send in
their best material experiments. He saw what I sent in and asked me to
do it for Moooi. What I submitted was the process of random coiling [of
resin and fibers], which included the Random Light that Marcel already
had in the Moooi collection. Then he saw my Carbon Chair and the Random
Chair.
The Carbon Chair consists of two parts: the base frame, which is coiled
in a structural way, and the seat, which is created on a regular pattern
on a mold. The seat looks random, but there is a system to it. When you
were young, did you ever make artwork where you put a lot of nails in a
board and connected them all to look like a little sailboat? That’s
what the seat of the Carbon Chair looks like on the mold. Then I remove
the pins. You coil the carbon fiber dipped in resin around all those
pins and take out the seat. The mold is very smooth—it’s made
out of polystyrene and fiberglass. It’s a single-sided mold, so one
side of the seat is smooth like the mold, the other side is piled out
from the mold. You sit on the smooth side.
Marcel had worked with resin before—for the Knotted Chair—so
he knew a bit about the material. There were some things that I would
never have solved without him—the base frame, for example. When he
first said he wanted it for Moooi, the seat and frame were connected
together with resin. He said, “First we have to make two separate
parts that can be screwed together [to make them easier to ship and
store].” He also suggested using a nicer fiber so women don’t
ruin their pantyhose when they sit on it. A lot of small details. |
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Dimensions:
W = 18 in
D = 31 in
H = 18 in |
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Bertjan Pot (b. 1975) graduated from the Man and Identity program
at the Eindhoven Design Academy in 1998. The Rotterdam resident has
since cofounded the company Monkey Boys with Daniel White and taught at
the Rietveld Academy, in Amsterdam. Since 2003 he has worked exclusively
as a freelancer. The designer’s more novel projects include 43
knitted lamps for ABN-Amro’s bank headquarters in Amsterdam, a
cloak for members of the Helmond city council to marry people in, and a
smoking lounge with sculpted sand ashtrays at the Spazio Consolo last
year during the Milan fair.
Top, courtesy Moooi; bottom, courtesy Bertjan Pot |
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