Series editors' preface - Wood Tools

Figure 1.27 Tulip chair, designed by Eero Saarinen
(1910–61), 1956. White moulded fibre glass shell on an
aluminium pedestal with blue woven textile seat
cushion
eral wood jointing, and other specialist adhesives
for special applications, releases some of
the original constraints on furniture designers.
Plastics were used for construction before the
Second World War but it was immediately
afterwards that they came into their own. The
use of sheet acrylics such as Lucite and
Perspex was developed in the 1940s along
with further experiments with glass-fibre and
an increasingly wide range of special plastics.
In 1940 Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen
developed moulded polyester seats that could
be fixed to a variety of underframes and in
1956 Saarinen designed his ‘Tulip chair’ using
glass-reinforced plastic for the seat and aluminium
for the base (Figure 1.27).
The development of glass fibre reinforced
plastic led to a new range of multi-shaped
objects, including the Womb chair designed by
Saarinen in 1948 and the DAX chair designed
by Charles and Ray Eames in the same year.
The injection moulding of plastics was a great
advance as one-piece furniture items could be
made. The most ubiquitous was Robin Day’s
chair design for Hille, made from polypropylene
(Figure 1.28). Italian designers developed
Furniture history 39
Figure 1.28 Polyprop chair Mark II designed by Robin
Day (1915– ). Injection moulded polypropylene made
by S. Hille and Co. from 1963
plastics and their processing to a high degree.
Two examples from the 1960s demonstrate
this. The Blow chair, an inflatable PVC chair
(1967), and the Sacco (1968), a bag of polystyrene
chips which could be used in a multitude
of ways, show how plastics could reflect
lifestyles and develop new furniture types. By
the 1980s plastics were revived as one of the
materials of postmodernism. The use of the
ubiquitous plastic laminates was one example.
Upholstery The technical changes in upholstery
have been related to both the internal
structure and the external coverings. At the
beginning of the century the spiral compression
spring was supreme but in the 1930s spiral tension
springs were introduced into Germany and
England. This released the designer from having
to create a deep section to a chair to accommodate
the spiral springs: he could produce a
more elegant easy chair whilst retaining the
benefits of metal springing. In 1929 the development
of latex-rubber cushioning was
patented by Dunlop. When made up into cushions,
this became an ideal partner to the tension-sprung
chair. Post-war developments