Jasper Morrison: the space inside a chair

A chair seems like a solid object: we look at it and see legs, a seat and a back. Jasper Morrison’s Air Chair, dated 1999 in his archive, also invites us to consider empty space. It is a polypropylene chair made for Magis in a single piece using gas-assisted moulding. Its name does not mean the owner has to inflate it. Air belongs to the story of manufacturing, rather than a ritual to repeat before sitting down on it. [1]

Morrison explains that the starting point was a sample of plastic tube made with this technology. The structure developed from the legs upwards, together with thinner surfaces for the seat and back. During the process, gas pushes the plastic against the mould walls, leaving internal cavities in the larger sections. A tubular area and a thin surface can therefore belong to the same piece, rather than being separate components assembled afterwards. The process helps determine what the form can become. [1]

The National Gallery of Victoria describes the hollow legs and thin surfaces of its example, manufactured in 2015 from a 1999 design. Separating those dates prevents a small misunderstanding: the year of a museum object does not always match the year of the idea. The museum also lists polypropylene and glass fibre. These are details about the example and its production; they should not become invented percentages of material savings or an environmental certification for the whole product. [2]

As an editorial exercise, imagine two identical silhouettes seen from outside. One might conceal a solid section and the other a cavity. The outline alone cannot explain their construction. This example does not prove that any tube can support a person: thickness, material and geometry must be designed together. That is the interesting discovery. Empty space is not necessarily forgotten material; it can be something deliberately organised by the design, while remaining invisible during ordinary use of the object. [1][2]

In his account, Morrison distinguishes the relatively smooth development of the form from the complexity of the mould, engineered by Luca Scoti. The simplicity we see therefore does not mean that the work behind it was simple. This is a useful reading beyond the museum: before calling an object banal, we can ask how it was made. A quiet surface may be the outcome of resolving many constraints. A design does not have to display all of those constraints on its face. [1]