In a new Wallpaper* summer series, architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Meet the Monoloc, the omnipresent plastic chair that inspires strong emotions
Carlo Ratti on the Monobloc plastic chair
Italy's most hated piece of design might also be its most beloved. We are talking about the monobloc plastic chair.
I also cannot make up my mind. Love or hate? Fieri sentio et excrucior — I feel it happening, and it is torture, as the poet Catullus might have put it. This summer, we encountered it everywhere: at Aunt Mariuccia’s barbecue. At an improvised open-air cinema in Lipari. Under the umbrellas on Ipanema Beach. Even on the cover of Bad Bunny’s latest album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. And yet, in the garden of our Italian offices, it is banned. The same went from 2008–2017 for the Swiss city of Basel.
Its origins are more noble than one might think. Many trace it back to Joe Colombo, one of the great masters of 20th-century Italian design. His Universale 4867 chair, produced by Kartell and now part of the collection of MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, revolutionised design in the 1960s.
It stacks easily, one chair on top of another. And it celebrates the possibilities of a material that was then revolutionary: plastic. Unlike traditional woodworking objects, made by subtraction and the assembly of separate parts and joints, in the Universale 4867 chair, everything is created through addition. Plastic injected into moulds. Psssst.
The monobloc is not as elegant as the Universale 4867. Yet it stacks better. And, above all, it has conquered half the world. It is estimated that more than one billion have been produced. One Italian company alone produces around ten million a year, at a unit cost of just a few euros.
And this is why the most beloved chair also becomes the most hated. First of all, because our relationship with plastic has changed. Once seen as a marvellous material, it has become a symbol of one of the great environmental challenges of our time. As it breaks down, it turns into thousands of fragments, which then fragment further into microplastics. We find them practically everywhere: from Antarctica to our brains, as well as throughout the food chain that connects them.
But beyond environmental concerns, there is another problem: repetition. The monobloc chair has become so ubiquitous that it can make you nauseous. Like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons: beautiful, but unbearable after the umpteenth replay in a neighbourhood pizzeria. Everything can be poison, Paracelsus said: it is the dose that makes the difference.
And perhaps the same is true of design. Objects, ultimately, tell us something about ourselves. From the primordial artifacts our ancestors displayed as trophies — the pelt of a bear, the pendant carved from a sharpened stone — to contemporary design products, there is always a story behind them. But what remains of a story when everyone tells it? According to my MIT colleague Ethan Zuckerman, the monobloc may have reached a state of ubiquity. So ubiquitous that it has disappeared.
And so, let us allow ourselves a brief moment of rest. As the back of the monobloc chair creaks, our gaze settles on the barbecue. There, between the Pachino tomato sizzling and the red Rotonda eggplant browning, another kind of design comes into view: the kind that tells us a story about who we are and what we have become. As yet another monobloc chair fades into the heat.
About 'Objectify' – a summer series from Italy by Carlo Ratti
Italy’s design canon has been told many times. The Bialetti moka pot, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, the Arco floor lamp: you know the list, and so does every airport bookshop and first-year design student. This column will discuss, poke, investigate, prod, ridicule and beatify the less glamorous Italian objects. They are the ones you ought to know, so that when you visit Italy, or spot apparitions of it on a friend’s social media, you can smugly point out: ‘Did you know the mosquito coil is a masterpiece of Italian design? The condom? The motorway toll transponder?’ Objects so ordinary that Italians walk past them, or handle them every day, without registering that someone, with a mellifluous surname, designed them.
Carlo Ratti
Proust wrote a seven-volume novel because a small cake dipped in tea, the madeleine, unlocked an involuntary flood of memory. For followers of the Italian version of this column, published weekly in Il Sole 24 Ore, the nation’s favourite Sunday read, perhaps these objects will have a similar effect. For you, anglophone readers peering at this somewhere between Rummidge and Euforia, they offer something else: beach conversation topics, an eye trained on unexpected places, and perhaps a few new madeleines for when you visit the peninsula yourself. After all, objects are never just objects. As the great Milanese designer Achille Castiglioni of Arco-floor-lamp fame once declared: ‘objects should keep us company’. Especially during this scorching summer.