It’s Elemental

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.