The Critic Duo Who Dissected a Thousand Chairs
Editor Sunjin Kim | Photographer Kane Hulse
Charlotte & Peter Fiell are internationally renowned design theorists and critics who have coauthored some 70 design books, published in more than 20 languages. They studied at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in the UK and ran a gallery in London focused on midcentury furniture. Over the past 35 years, they have analyzed and researched design, specializing in furniture while also covering a wide range of subjects, from graphic design and fashion to architecture and photography. In their books, the Louis Ghost appears as a successful example of “structural unification,” a key concept running through chair design, and as a chair that led to a rediscovery of the greatness of plastic.
This interview is featured in Magazine C Issue 3 ‘Louis Ghost’.
Since its publication in 1997, 1000 Chairs, which tells the stories of 1,000 chairs, has remained consistently popular. We’d love to hear how the book came about.
At the time, we were running a gallery on Kings Road in London. One day Benedikt Taschen, founder of the art book publisher Taschen, came to see us and asked if we had any ideas for a book. Shortly after, we visited his office in Cologne and explained the synopsis for 1000 Chairs, which we were developing then. Taschen decided to publish it on the spot. That was the start of our long relationship with Taschen. As soon as it came out, 1000 Chairs was a big hit, and it became by far the most successful bestseller of all the books we’ve written. Nearly 30 years have passed, and it has never once gone out of print.
What was the initial idea behind the book?
We wanted to attempt a large-scale, comprehensive survey of a single product type. It was an approach close to that of a design collector or connoisseur. It’s hard to imagine now, but this was before the internet became widespread, so we gathered material on 1,000 chairs by visiting museums, libraries, manufacturers, design studios, auction houses and so on. We arranged the chairs in an order that took into account period, material and design movement. Then we compiled details for each one, such as year of design/production, designer, manufacturer, materials and dimensions, and condensed it all into a single book. Since then, we’ve continued with new series for Taschen, including 1000 Lights, Ultimate Collector Cars and Motorcycles. Right now we’re writing a book on vintage watches.
We’re curious why you chose chairs as your first subject.
The function of “sitting” stays the same, yet chairs have constantly changed in shape, color, material and technology. That made them ideal for showing the flow of design history. Even someone who doesn’t know much about design will naturally notice, flipping through 1000 Chairs, how their forms and styles have continually evolved. It’s also fascinating how clearly each chair reveals its designer’s personality and cultural background. Alison and Peter Smithson, the husband-and-wife architects who worked in Britain in the 1960s, looked at Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s chairs and said, “The Miesian city is implicit in the Miesian chair.” Isn’t it remarkable that you can look at a chair’s form and imagine the very world its designer lives in? That’s possible because the chair is a concentrated object, carrying so many meanings that it rewards inference and interpretation.
Philippe Starck’s Louis Ghost, the subject of Magazine C Issue 3, appears on page 589 of 1000 Chairs. Within this chronology of chairs, explored over some 600 pages, what context and meaning does the Louis Ghost hold?
When we first received an email from the Magazine C team saying they wanted to interview us about the Louis Ghost, we thought it was a very interesting choice. The Louis Ghost has featured not only in many of our books but also in a lecture we gave at Thomas Heatherwick’s studio in 2016. We consider it important because it achieves “structural unification.” In design theory, objects with a “single form, single structure,” like the Louis Ghost, a one-piece chair made from a single material, clear polycarbonate, are described as having achieved structural unification. Arne Jacobsen’s Series 7 chair, with its one-piece shell, and Eero Saarinen’s Tulip chair, which merges the legs into one, also fall into this category. We feel an instinctive satisfaction when we see such objects. They’re not only visually beautiful but also the most efficient forms in terms of material, energy and cost. For more than 100 years since Michael Thonet’s No. 14 chair, a great deal of research and experimentation has gone into achieving this. Along the way, the most aesthetically, technically and commercially important chairs were born. In that sense, structural unification has been a major driving force in the development of the chair. The Louis Ghost is one of its success stories.
How do you assess the transparent design of the Louis Ghost, which used clear polycarbonate, an innovative material at the time? There were see-through chairs before, such as Giancarlo Piretti’s Plia chair and Shiro Kuramata’s Miss Blanche chair, but none were completely transparent like the Louis Ghost.
Transparent design has long captivated people with a lightness and sense of space that wooden or metal furniture cannot offer. It feels relatively familiar now, but in the early 2000s everyone was amazed by the transcendent appeal of the Louis Ghost. It has an elegance that makes you feel you should handle it with care, and it’s a jewel-like chair that transforms the atmosphere of a room. It’s a noble design born from treating plastic responsibly and intelligently, and that’s not an effect we can expect from just any plastic chair.
What if the Louis Ghost had been made of wood or steel?
It would have been a completely different chair. Since it follows the baroque style, in wood it would have looked like a cheap antique reproduction. In metal, we think it would have come across as very cold.
The Louis Ghost also appears in Plastic Dreams, your book on the development of plastic design through some 120 products. How do you assess the Louis Ghost as a plastic chair?
The Louis Ghost symbolizes the “rediscovery” of plastic. The development of plastics is directly linked to the artistic evolution of the chair as a concept. Each time a new plastic material emerged, stronger and more beautiful furniture followed. Polyurethane foam, for example, made sculptural, organic forms possible without springs or an internal frame. So there were great plastic chairs even before the Louis Ghost came out. Charles & Ray Eames’s Shell Chair group, the first chairs mass-produced in plastic, achieved enormous commercial success thanks to their beautiful forms and reasonable prices. Verner Panton created the Panton Chair, the first single-piece plastic cantilever chair, which graced the cover of the revised edition of 1000 Chairs. With it, he met one of the most important structural challenges in the history of the chair. The Blow armchair, designed by Jonathan De Pas, Donato D’Urbino and Paolo Lomazzi, was somewhat pointless as a chair, but it introduced a playful, intriguing concept that further expanded what a chair could do. However, in the late 1960s, cheap, poorly made products like the Monobloc chair began to appear, and the status of plastic chairs fell rapidly. Products that ignored the aesthetic potential of plastic and maximized only convenience and economy raised concerns about the material itself. In the 1980s and 1990s, the oil crisis made matters worse, and plastic design struggled. Then in 2002, Kartell and Philippe Starck created a technical masterpiece together, the Louis Ghost. It reminded us that plastic could be used to create design of much higher value.
Some see the Monobloc as meaningful because it is the most democratic chair. What criteria do you use to distinguish a good plastic chair from a bad one?
It’s simple. You can easily tell by the design and the technology. The Monobloc is a chair concerned solely with cutting costs. It uses plastic of such low quality that it can’t be recycled, and because it’s so cheap, it’s treated almost as disposable. Regardless of how widely it’s used, it’s truly appalling to think of the countless Monobloc chairs thrown away after a few years. The Louis Ghost, by contrast, uses high-quality clear polycarbonate that is easy to recycle, stays hygienic over years of use and is highly durable. Making a plastic chair of this caliber requires advanced technology and engineering. The investment in product research, prototyping and repeated testing is enormous, too. On top of that, at £642 (about ₩1,142,500), the Louis Ghost is fairly expensive for a plastic chair. You might think a machine-made, mass-produced plastic chair should cost less, but that isn’t really the case. Given what Kartell invested to bring the Louis Ghost to life, the price is entirely justified. It’s also strategic, since there’s no reason to sell a chair made with great design and technology at a low price.
That seems to be why people say Kartell “turned plastic into a luxury.” Philippe Starck’s fame must have played a big part, too.
Of course. Because making a plastic chair requires so much investment, manufacturers usually bring in experienced designers who can give them confidence in its success. That’s also why creating a plastic chair is a major achievement for a designer. We think it was an entirely natural choice for Kartell to collaborate with Philippe Starck from the late 1980s. At the time, he heralded the start of the so-called “global designer” era. With one international success after another, he stood out far more than contemporaries such as Marc Newson, Ross Lovegrove and Jasper Morrison. In this context, the Louis Ghost could also be called an icon of the period when national design identities were expanding into a global one.
So how do you see this chair, designed by a Frenchman and made by an Italian manufacturer? Which country’s design does it represent?
That’s an interesting question. Judging only by its form, inspired by chairs from French royal palaces, or by the designer’s nationality, you might think of it as French design. But the Louis Ghost is clearly Italian design. Italian design has the power to claim even things not made by Italians as Italian design. (Laughs) Above all, the Louis Ghost is a truly “Kartell-esque” chair. If Kartell hadn’t made it, this chair wouldn’t exist. There are very few manufacturers that understand making plastic furniture as well as Kartell does.
Although it was created with a world-famous designer’s ideas and innovative technology, the Louis Ghost is a popular chair, far removed from the idea of a “collectible piece.” Do you think that status might change in the future?
The success of the Louis Ghost is tied not only to the designer’s fame and technology but directly to mass production. By maximizing efficiency in development and manufacturing, it was able to establish itself as a mass-market product. The same goes for the fact that the best-selling chairs in furniture history are mostly plastic. Collectors, on the other hand, usually prize objects for their scarcity. If the Louis Ghost, which has won worldwide popularity and achieved phenomenal sales, became rare enough to be a “collectible piece,” that would be a truly dire situation. We don’t want to imagine the hundreds of thousands of other Louis Ghost chairs being found dumped in landfills!
Then how do you think we can move design forward, living as we do in an already saturated world and an age of overconsumption?
There’s an interesting chair we discovered while curating the exhibition ‘The Creative Circle—Eco-Conscious Design and Craft’ at the Court Barn Museum in the UK. The Rex chair by Dutch designer Ineke Hans is made from recycled industrial waste. You can use it for as long as you like, and when you return it, you get back a £20 (about ₩35,600) deposit. It’s a clever idea. As the Rex chair shows, we need to keep thinking about ways to avoid filling the world with clutter. We’d tell designers to look to the Danish furniture maker Carl Hansen & Søn as a model. They make products that last for generations. Above all, the way we consume needs to change, too. Buying from secondhand shops or using hand-me-downs is good, but we can’t avoid buying new things altogether. So we think we should buy the best-quality things, ones worth using for a lifetime. For example, buying a plastic chair today can never really be called ethical. But if you’re going to buy one, the Louis Ghost, which is beautiful and built to last, would be a good choice.
Want to dive deeper?
Issue.03 Louis Ghost
Designed by Philippe Starck and produced by Kartell in 2002, the Louis Ghost has won worldwide acclaim as the very definition of a beautiful, sturdy, light, and transparent chair. Its classic design, modeled on an eighteenth-century Baroque chair, and the innovation of a single-mold polycarbonate body created an iconic chair of the century—transparent yet unmistakably present. Rather than commanding attention with flamboyance, it quietly gives way to its surroundings with a serene beauty, complementing any space and serving anyone in whatever way they wish. The reputation of this finely made plastic chair endures to this day.
