Carbon Chair
Designed by:
Pot B
Co-Designed by:
Wanders M
Designer:
Bertjan Pot
Co-Designer:
Marcel Wanders
Date of Design:
2004
Date of Manufacture:
Decade:
2000s
Region:
Europe
Significance:
Carbon fibre makes the design very lightweight
Manufacturer:
MoooI
Material:
Carbon fibre
Process:
Monobloc:
No
Cantilever:
No
Renewable Carbon:
No
Weight:
1.5
Note:
Country of origin: Netherlands. Image: Moooi. In 2003, Bertjan Pot (1975- ) made a 3D ‘sketch’ of the Eames Plastic chair with an Eiffel Tower base. Pot likened this process to using carbon tracking paper to get a copy of a drawing. Using just carbon fibre and epoxy resin the ‘sketch’ was strong enough to sit on, ‘because of his [Eames] brilliant engineering job’.
The following year, in cooperation with Marcel Wanders, Pot, aged just 29, went on to produce the Carbon chair. Using similar techniques to those he developed to copy the Eames chair, Pot used hand woven carbon fibre and epoxy resin. Incredibly, no metal frame was needed to support the structure, just screws to attach the base to the chair. The chair is manufactured by Marcel Wanders’ company Moooi, in a factory that specialises in woven rattan. The manual labour involved means the chair cannot compete on price against monoblocs, retailing at four times the cost of a Poly. Fake leather seat and back rest pads were made available, as optional extras, from 2014 to enhance comfort and a bar stool was added to the range in 2015. The Carbon chair is lightweight (less than 1.5g), stackable and suitable for outdoor use.