Here goes more melt & burn plastic chair glory.. I was much surprised to find the humble monobloc in one of Berlin´s most upmarket shopping venues, the I.M.Pei-designed Quartier 206. For the summer sale weeks the basement “Cabinet” store´s windows come with molten and twisted plastic furniture in mint and black, a befitting statement after the incredibly hot summer we saw this year. Another photo after the click.

One of the most electrifying results of an afternoon´s frantic page viewing across the all encompassing archive of “form” was the très 1990s above advert by Frog Design for a (semi-?) monobloc they did for Jardin in 1991, during the very heydays of the monobloc plastic chair. I am not even sure, if this design ever went into mass-production, since I never ever saw it anywhere else. Frog back then was however THE design firm that you may translate in today´s Jonathan Ive and Ideo combined. I reckoned this was a must-share. Click for links and additional mumblings plus a bigger and better view of the somewhat disappointing scan.

People hop around the world on one leg or so to raise funds for landmine victims, teachers take a walk in the woods with their class to unveil the stunning difference between oak and pine tree, and in pedestrian areas there is the occasional Jesus freak megaphoningly informing passersby about the most recent nigh world end before gently taken back to his nursery home..
Henning of ff´s sister weblog plastikstuhl.de did neither of these but combined all strategies into one hillarious “Plastic Chair Run”, running through Hamburg and, well watch yourself.. …

Sorry, there won´t be a big, fat Rolex-logo on a plastic chair in this post. The story behind the photo isn´t bad though at all, some Rolex involved.

Bryan the other week pointed out an infommercial by Grosfillex on DesigningSpaces.TV . Unless, you are a true mono afficionado, I cannot recommend watching the clip. It´s just blasting cheesy suburbia home improvement, but I wanted to file it on the blog for a simple, least to me interesting fact:

Just noticed public Swiss TV SF1 has this older clip from 2007 now online. It´s a 4:01 minutes report on the (successful) attempts of several Swiss cities´ to ban the Monobloc plastic chair from their centers. Statements from city officials – and myself, shot in my Erfurt loft.

“A victim lies outside a hotel after the explosion in Mogadishu, Somalia, Thursday, Dec. 3, 2009. Police spokesman, Col. Abdilahi Hassan Barise, says three Somali Cabinet ministers are among nine people killed in a bombing that ripped through a university graduation ceremony, and says the ministers for education, higher education and health were among those killed in the blast. ..”

The BBC has a video report about an incident at some regional parliament in Argentina, involving – you guess..

Volker Albus, designer, educator and researcher, has published a piece about the Monobloc plastic chair in Form 228 (September 2009):
Who is Afraid of the Monobloc?