We were delivering a few Panton chairs last week, and it sent me reading about how the thing is actually made and why it mattered. The short version is that it was the first cantilevered plastic chair moulded in one single piece. The longer version is more interesting, and it is worth understanding the stories behind the products we get to work with every day.
Start with the problem: too many parts
Before Thonet's No. 14 of 1859, most chairs were hand-crafted, hard to make and hard to deliver. Thonet got it down to six pieces of steam-bent wood, ten screws and two nuts, simple enough to flat-pack, which made delivery easier than ever and assembly on arrival possible. That is why you still see it in cafés all over the world (I am writing this from one at my local, in fact).
But that is still eighteen components, and more parts means more failure points. Which raises the obvious question: what if a chair could just be one part?
Panton spent a decade chasing it
That is the question Verner Panton spent the best part of a decade on. First came the Bachelor chair in 1955 for Fritz Hansen: a stripped-back tubular steel frame with a fabric sling, pared down to a handful of parts. A year later he went further with the S Chair, a cantilevered form in moulded plywood with no back legs and no visible joints. Fittingly, it was Thonet who brought that one to market in the mid-1960s.
What was actually new
Panton was not the first to make a chair from a single piece, and he was not even the first to mass-produce one in plastic. That was Helmut Bätzner's Bofinger chair, designed in 1964 and launched at the Cologne furniture fair in 1966. What Panton pulled off was harder: the first single-piece, cantilevered plastic chair. No back legs, no joints, moulded in one shot. That is the Panton chair.
It was not an easy sell. He was well ahead of the manufacturers. He pitched the idea through the late 1950s and was turned down as technically unfeasible. He built his first prototype around 1960. Vitra came on board in 1963, and after ten prototypes the first pilot run of 150 chairs did not appear until 1967.
Delivering them today
The Panton chair now comes in a range of colours, and pink is my personal favourite. They ship in bubble wrap with a cardboard stabiliser at the base, two to a box, and they are wonderfully light and easy to handle. Ten years of engineering to remove every joint, and the payoff turns up at the loading dock: one clean piece, nothing to work loose in transit.