Austrian daily “Der Standard” has an extensive piece written by Bert Rebhandl about the monoblock plastic chair and also about my efforts in its current Saturday supplement. German only.

I should have written this weeks before, sorry. ff takes a break for a couple of weeks or maybe months since I focus on my work with the Great Pyramid.

Last week I appeared in the evening news show of Swiss SF1 when the guys there featured several large cities´ monoblock bans. Here is the short film.

ff´s current home town Erfurt has banned plastic chairs last year but they have survived in the current window-dressing of the Fielmann store (Germany´s largest optometrist). Thanks for the photo, Daniel.

While Henning managed to track down more - now even white - plastic chairs halfway down to the South Pole, ff chooses the sun and a bright blue today.
Photo by Andy @ HoboTraveller

The good thing about challenges is: They can be accepted. After Christian had mailed the photo from Argentina the day before yesterday and I read his comment (both in the post below), I was wondering if there really wasn´t plastic chairs in Antarctica. Why not? Polypropylene is getting very brittle at temperatures below Zero – but who would sit outside there anyway.. Inside monoblock chairs would make as much sense there as anywhere else in the world.

So I googled some but except for a real nice image gallery from the German Neumayer Station I didn´t find much. Not so Daniel. To make a long story short: Here´s two monoblock plastic chairs from Robert F. Scott´s Discovery Hut on a peninsula of the Ross Island. Remember: The unlucky guy who lost the “Race to the South Pole” back in 1912 to Roald Amundsen and died in the ice on his way back.

During his first “Discovery Expedition” in 1901 – 1904 he and his colleagues built this hut that is now a tourist sight. In the northeastern corner of the hut in 2002 you found this:

Are these monoblock plastic chairs? They are.

The colour as well as the shape are a little bit odd but if you look at it closely you clearly can tell by the inverted legs.

OK. New record set. But since Ross Island is by definition near the coast of the continent, there´s still room for improvement. We are at about 77°40´S now - anyone up for a new race to the South Pole?

Daniel, thank you so much. And cheers Christian for the inspiring challenge.

Image from Seth White´s website. There´s more photos of the hut and Antarctica in general.

Christian writes: This “Mascardi Industria Argentina” model “ was found and catalogued in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, the southernmost city in the world, by Christian Kracht on March 11, 2007. At exactly 54°49′0″S / 68°19′0″W, this is the southernmost monobloc in the world. Behind the chair – to the south, past the wooden fence - is an argentine army barracks, and to the south of that – nothing. Unless of course, one counts Antarctica as “something” - Antarctica being the only place in the world truly without white plastic chairs. I challenge anyone to disprove me.

Stephanie Hoeggerl from Vienna mailed these photos of a ferry in Imbassai, north of Salvador, Brazil. Just wonderful, thank you!

I stumbled upon this at first sight not too spectacular photo at flickr. Looking somewhat closer at the chairs one realizes that they are not molded from plastic but entirely made of ceramics. Rachel Davidson who took this photo in December 2006 was so kind to inform me she saw these objects at last year´s Art Basel Miami. Still that wasn´t enough to google the artist. If anybody by any chance was in Miami and remembers these chairs or knows anything that could be helpful to identify the artist, I would be most grateful for a comment.

Photo from dallasdavidsons @ flickr

Two more images from Christian Y. Schmidt. Top: Midlevels, Hong Kong Island. Bottom: Taken on Lamma Island a sparsely populated but not too small island off downtown Hong Kong. While I hadn´t seen many monobloc chairs in Hong Kong Island and Kowloon last December, Christian reports thousands from Lamma Island.

A shoeshine guy´s stand in Washington DC.
Photo: Thomas Dashuber