Pastilli chair
Armchair
1967 (designed), 1968 (manufactured)
1967 (designed), 1968 (manufactured)
| Artist/Maker | |
| Place of origin |
Many designers across Europe were designing amusing, brightly coloured, plastic furniture in the late 1960s. In Finland, Eero Aarnio designed several chairs that were variants on sphere shapes. The domed base of this low armchair meant it could, quite literally, rock and roll when someone sat in it, a metaphor for the youthful, relaxed lifestyle that dominated Pop design in this period. The two halves of the chair were moulded from fibreglass, joined in a seam around the circumference of the circular chair. Fibreglass was still a relatively new material for furniture in 1968 and gave designers new freedoms in the forms their furniture could take. The Pastilli chair was launched at the Cologne Furniture Fair in 1968 and rapidly won its designer many awards in Europe and the USA. The V&A acquired this chair for an exhibition about modern chair design, held in 1970.
Object details
| Categories | |
| Object type | |
| Title | Pastilli chair (assigned by artist) |
| Materials and techniques | Moulded fibreglass |
| Brief description | Pastilli chair, circular yellow moulded fibreglass form, designed by Eero Aarnio, manufactured by Asko, Finland, 1967 |
| Physical description | Egg-yolk yellow fibreglass chair in the form of a depressed sphere. The base is domed allowing it to rock and a depression in the top and to one side forms the seat. A seam runs around the circumference joining the top to the bottom. |
| Dimensions |
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| Summary | Many designers across Europe were designing amusing, brightly coloured, plastic furniture in the late 1960s. In Finland, Eero Aarnio designed several chairs that were variants on sphere shapes. The domed base of this low armchair meant it could, quite literally, rock and roll when someone sat in it, a metaphor for the youthful, relaxed lifestyle that dominated Pop design in this period. The two halves of the chair were moulded from fibreglass, joined in a seam around the circumference of the circular chair. Fibreglass was still a relatively new material for furniture in 1968 and gave designers new freedoms in the forms their furniture could take. The Pastilli chair was launched at the Cologne Furniture Fair in 1968 and rapidly won its designer many awards in Europe and the USA. The V&A acquired this chair for an exhibition about modern chair design, held in 1970. |
| Bibliographic reference | Modern chairs 1918-1970, London, Lund Humphries, 1971 |
| Collection | |
| Accession number | CIRC.13-1969 |
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| Record created | March 1, 2007 |
| Record URL |
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