Panton Chair

Its distinctive shape – with a curved base instead of legs – brought rapid fame for the voluptuous Panton Chair. This design belongs to the tradition of the quest to create the ultimate one-piece chair. Until the 1950s, designers attempted to find the solution in the treatment of a single sheet of plywood, fibreglass or metal, which was cut, bent and fixed in position. However, the sculptural potential of new plastics and casting techniques gave this quest an entirely new dimension. Verner Panton searched for the correct method of production for almost ten years, and so his chair was not actually the first to come out of a machine in a single piece; that was Helmut Bätzner’s Bofinger-Stuhl in 1966, which is also in the Stedelijk Museum’s collection. The first series of Panton Chairs was made in 1967 by Vitra, using fibreglass-reinforced polyester, which required a labour-intensive production method. A year later, the move to Baydur, a rigid polyurethane foam, meant that production of the chair truly became an industrial process.