A Chair for Today
Gubi’s new F300 chair is a re-editioned version of a 1960s design by Pierre Paulin, which is simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic (image: Gubi).
“Those new, rounder, more comfortable shapes were such a success that they're still being copied today,” French designer Pierre Paulin (1927-2009) remarked in 2008 of his work with Artifort, the Dutch manufacturer with whom Paulin collaborated from the late 1950s to 1975. Works such as Tongue, Mushroom, Ribbon and Orange Slice were seats that wrapped layers of foam and stretched fabric around curvaceous metal frames, creating sinuous, fluid forms that seemed to match the growing optimism and permissiveness of the 1960s.
While many of Paulin’s designs from this period have remained in production and attracted imitators, one of the designs that resulted from the collaboration with Artifort sadly fell by the wayside. The F300 was first shown by Artifort in 1965, before vanishing from production in the mid-1970s. Whereas many of Paulin’s designs for the company were soft and enveloping, the F300 pulled Paulin’s design language in a different direction. Its fibreglass structure was rigid and left on full display, rather than being enveloped in upholstery, meaning that only its deep, wide seat was wrapped in cushioned textile. Whereas other Paulin chairs offered seating in a state of full organic profusion, the F300 is starker and more technical in tone – its saddle-like form swoops down into its rigid structure, its seat suspended in its fibreglass cradle like the mouth of a flower yet to bloom. “The F300 perfectly embodies my father’s approach to design,” notes Benjamin Paulin, Pierre’s son and one of the custodians of his legacy, “and the balance between sculpture, elegance, and comfort he sought in his work.”
Image: Gubi.
Although the F300 did not enjoy the production afterlife of many of Paulin’s designs, it has today re-emerged in a new kind of copy – albeit one in a form approved of and licensed by Paulin’s estate. This year the chair has been re-editioned by Danish furniture brand Gubi, which had previously restored Paulin’s 1975 Pacha Chair to the market in 2018 – a chubby, cloud-like lounge seat, enrobed with boucle upholstery. “When we launched Pacha, it really captured the zeitgeist of that moment– that 70s vibe with the boucle on a very organic, low slung furniture piece,” says Marie Kristine Schmidt, Gubi's CEO. “It gives your home a lot of character and it’s also very flexible so you can use it in different rooms and spaces. We wanted to pursue that same vision with the next piece, but we also really fell in love with the more sculptural, architectural side of Paulin.” Hence the F300, which is a more rigid chair, but one whose light construction allows for ease of movement, and whose broad seat enables multiple different seating postures. “It still has these organic curves and the hammock-like shape, but it is definitely more defined than Pacha,” Schmidt adds.
The F300 may have been well defined, but it was only sparsely documented. During development of the new edition of the chair, Gubi’s team discovered that records surrounding the original small-batch manufacture of the chair were naturally limited, while vintage pieces revealed small variations across models – traces that pointed towards a reliance on manual processes across different stages of production. “There's a lot of investigative work that goes into this,” Schmidt explains of Gubi's new version of the chair. “First and foremost, there were some sketches, but not complete drawings.” In order to resolve the discrepancies between different original pieces that they discovered, the team therefore had to combine a certain level of intuition with iterative work, in order to reverse engineer the design. “It's really about trying to zoom in on what was the designer's intent and vision,” Schmidt says. “We’re trying to capture that and then put the pieces of the puzzle together in the best possible way, as well as working with people who recollect what it used to be.” Paulin’s son Benjamin, she notes, “has memories of the design, and a love for it, so there's a good anchor in that. From there, it’s a lot of engineering work on our side to make sure that we nail it.”
Behind the scenes images of the moulding process of the F300 chair, which was made from HiREK, an engineered polymer produced using plastic waste (image: Gubi).
In contrast to re-editioning historic dining chairs, whose proportions often need to be adapted to suit contemporary body shapes, the dimensions of the original F300 have been maintained in the new production. What has changed, however, is the material. The original F300s were largely executed in fibreglass, which is now rarely used in furniture production given environmental concerns over its production and recyclability. In the late 1980s, for instance, Herman Miller abandoned use of the material in production of the designs of Charles and Ray Eames owing to “concerns about its safety and sustainability,” with fibreglass only returning to the company’s catalogue in a limited form, and a new formulation, in 2014. As such, Gubi sought out a new material when it came to reproducing the F300, eventually turning to the engineered polymer HiREK, which is produced using plastic waste. HiREK pellets are melted and injection moulded to create the chair’s structural elements, before being assembled, the upholstery added, and the final chair hand-finished. “We had to create everything from scratch,” says Schmidt. “We developed the moulds, and the assembly process then requires a lot of precision work. So this product is, I would say, a perfect combination of something that's very technological at one point, but still very crafted, because we couldn't get the result we needed if we didn't have skilled people interacting with the products in the assembly to finesse it. It still requires a lot of manual work.”
Hand processes are used to refine the shape of the F300 chair (image: Gubi).
The decision to utilise HiREK, Schmidt explains, was the result of a long research project. Material updates to classic fibreglass designs often prove unpopular due to the loss of the visual effect of the original material, whose internal fibres are typically visible and serve to create an irregular depth of colour. In the case of the F300, however, Paulin’s original designs “were quite saturated in colour,” Schmidt explains, meaning that the transition to a new material is less pronounced than in other designs from the period. As such, Gubi was able to focus its search around additional virtues that they wanted the new chair to embody. “It’s a chair that is meant to be moved around, so it needs to be lightweight,” Schmidt says. “We also wanted to make sure we could deliver the gloss surfaces, without having too many steps where you need to polish it. And then, of course, we wanted to go in a more sustainable route with the product. Those were the boundaries.” HiREK, which is produced from waste; is lightweight; and naturally produces a high-gloss finish without additional finishing, met the brief.
Adding upholstery to the chair (image: Gubi).
The result of Gubi’s efforts is a contemporary chair that appears simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic. The F300’s aesthetic is undeniably of its time. It speaks to the 1960s’ preoccupation with the space age and its focus on furniture and objects executed in shapes that were curvaceously organic, but which often owed their form to advances in industrial plastics. It is also an aesthetic whose optimistic embodiment of what life might look like in the future is now often seen as naive, but which has never fully been abandoned in the popular imagination, with space age aesthetics continuing to resurface today. The 1960s’ vision of future living – rich in spacious, flexible furniture, whose curvaceous forms seemed to defy the rigours and strictures of the past – is one that we still live with today, and which the F300 successfully embodies. While much of the gloss of 1960s culture may long since have faded, the virtues of light, adaptable furniture have not. “For Gubi, it's never about nostalgia, it's always about trying to capture what is now,” Schmidt says. “This chair is really pointing towards the future – it's playful, it's sculptural and it's creative, and those are elements that are part of a conversation that's happening right now. In fact, I think that this chair will always look like the future.”
Words Oli Stratford