Metalwing

Absolutely nothing about this design is convenient to execute in wood. Every piece is curved, most have compound curves. This is artisan craftsmanship: it's inherently slow, manual, and skilled. Notice, also, that most features of this chair must be thicker and heavier than on the plastic chairs being imitated. Injection-molded chairs can be produced in this shape in a matter of minutes with far less material at very low cost.

The standard one-piece injection molded plastic chair is referred to as a "Monobloc", literally just describing it as a single piece. The history of this chair is fascinating, and it all starts back in 1946, with the D.C. Simpson Monobloc.

Douglas Colborne Simpson was an architect mostly active in the 40's and 50's, designing a lot of classic mid-century style buildings in Vancouver, Canada(1). In 1946, as part of a government project to find new uses for materials developed for WWII, he and engineer James Donahue developed the design you see above, simply called the Monobloc(2). Unfortunately, we don't know a lot about this chair as it was only ever a prototype, and no modern examples have survived, nor have most of the records surrounding it(3). To my knowledge, we don't actually know if this was technically injection molded, or crafted some other way. We can't even be sure if it was technically the inspiration for the designs that followed, but no matter the case it has lent its name to the entire genre.

Plastics technology was simply not what it is today back in the 1940's. Most people would have had very little plastic in their homes, most likely just a few pieces of Bakelite (the first commercially viable plastic, made from a formaldehyde based resin in a Bakelizer, the best name for any industrial manufacturing equipment ever). Over the following few decades, however, as a wider variety of plastics were both developed and came down in price to the point of commercial viability, the concept of the plastic chair was revisited, and the first folks to revisit it were Helmut Batzner, in 1964, and Joe Colombo, in 1965.

This, is the Bofinger chair, Batzner's design:

The elements of D.C.Simpson's Monobloc were pretty alien compared to todays mass-manufactured plastic chairs, but here we start to see some more modern elements come into play. The first thing you probably notice is the front legs, which have that characteristic visible 90 degree bend in them for added rigidity, plus a much more comfortably leaned back and slightly scoop-shaped seat. We also see much more support in the back rest, with broad triangles allowing for a more efficient use of materials without losing back support.

Similar to Simpson, Batzner was not an industrial designer, but an architect, and this chair had a very specific purpose. Batzner and his team designed it as part of a project to build a new theater in Karlsruhe, Germany, which required a large amount of additional seating which could be easily packed away into storage or distributed around the theaters rooms by the staff (4). As such, it was designed to be both lightweight and stackable, so several of them could be moved by one person, and they could be stored compactly. This piece of furniture was a huge hit a the theater, and was so popular that 120,000 units would ultimately be manufactured and sold around the world, with each one taking just 5 minutes to produce (4).

Around the same time, Joe Colombo enters the scene with this:

Colombo was an artist in several mediums who, after taking over his families appliance company in the 50's, made the shift towards architecture and interior design, and started designing a wide array of trend-setting furniture(5). The chair shown above is known as the Universale (sometimes referred to as the Chair Universal 4867), designed in 1965. This chair differs pretty greatly from the ones that came after it, it many ways it represents a different path that could have been taken, but it's also very widely referenced as an inspiration for what is broadly considered the origin of the white plastic chair the world over.

Enter: the Fauteuil 300

This is, arguably, the first iteration of the white plastic chair we all know today. Designed by Henry Massonnet in 1972, the Fauteuil 300 and it's imitators are, collectively, the single most widely used piece of furniture in the entire world(6). Before that, however, it was something else entirely: works of art.

What might be hard to recognize in hindsight is that all of these chairs described so far were not everyday objects. They were on the forefront of modern design, they made use of brand new materials and manufacturing processes, and at the time they were each made, they were slick, stylish, and fairly expensive. Despite the speed at which they could be manufactured, these innovative, high-end chairs rose sharply in cost up through the early 1980's due to the sheer demand for them. They weren't cheap spare seating you stuck in the garage, they were placed at dining tables and on fine patios, and they were a wildly popular talking point. That's not to say their expense justified their artistic value, but rather that their expense and popularity was a product of their status as highly contemporary and boundary-pushing designs.

With the price of plastics declining after the 70's, the increasing accessibility of injection molding to manufacturers, and the widespread popularity of these designs, copycats proliferated rapidly, and eventually drove the price down. This era, in the 80's and 90's, is when these chairs became cheap an ubiquitous, and where they became manufactured the world over.

And here is where we reach this piece, "Plastic chair in wood", by Maarten Baas, and a piece of the history I've left out so far. The Monobloc was designed to be made out of wood. Like the the other chairs designed by Joe Colombo, like the chairs that predated the Simpson, the Monobloc was designed with the intention of using laminated plywood, but as the artists and designers behind them began to experiment with new materials they fell in love with the idea of making them from plastic, and so they did. They redesigned and redesigned until they made something that would be impossible to make in wood at a price most people could afford, but which could be made from plastic in mere minutes. The organic curves and thin profiles would take so much time, so much waste material, so much skill and effort to create if made of wood that they could never be furniture, they could only be art. Baas' chair is a perfect, beautiful reflection of that.

That, in brief, is the history of the design of the white plastic Monobloc chair, but it's not all there is to know. In fact, it's kind of just the start. I've linked my sources below, but I would strongly recommend checking out the German documentary Monobloc, by Hauke Wendler. It goes over the history, but it's far more interested with what the Monobloc means, and what it's place is in our world today. The impact it's made, the better and the worse, and what it says about us. It's fascinating, and well worth your time.

sources below.

people with no common sense: je11yf1sh, je11¥fi5h, j*llyf*sh, je//ÿf!sh, j3ï||yf¡sh, gel lee fisk

result: cannot account for the sheer amount of possible ways to alter the word jellyfish

conclusion: i have to see jellyfish now.

DO NOT CENSOR TAGS

Other materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it.  That would leak out seemingly at random no less.  Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.

Also the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness.  Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation.  Also beads.  Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.

For one, the precursor to true glass was fritware (also known as faience in certain contexts), and we have a fairly sizeable body of evidence for fritware primarily being used as a decorative material, often as a substitute for ornate stones and minerals, particularly as a substitute for turquoise in Egypt.

And the earliest examples of true glass that we see are often treated the same way, like a stone. Made into beads yes, but also carved into sculptures and decorative inlays and settings.

Furthermore, the first glass vessels were usually core-formed, which means they were built by coiling heated glass around a core of sand and clay, fusing it, then scraping out the core. This fundamentally creates a porous interior surface embedded with clay and sand, retaining the same problems as unglazed clay vessels in terms of sanitation, albeit not quite as severely.

And notice how I said unglazed, glazing techniques for pottery were developed at around the same time as the very earliest examples of simple glass objects. Glazing provides all the sanitary benefits of glass, while requiring significantly less labor, significantly less fuel, and significantly cheaper materials than glass, in a medium that is also less likely to break. Glass for most of its early history was Incredibly expensive to produce, and it’s not until around the 1st century BCE that that development of glassblowing makes glassware cheap enough to compete with clay goods (and even then, we continue to see plenty of clay, stone, and metal vessels persist).

From the evidence we have, it seems much more likely that the driving force for the development of glassworking in its early history was for its aesthetic and decorative value. Which makes sense, humans like when things look pretty.

And while this wasn’t said here, I feel the need to address it since it’s absolutely everywhere elsewhere in the reblogs of this post: No, glass is not a superviscous or supercooled fluid. It does not flow appreciably on any observable timescales, and plenty of unambiguously solid materials flow to the same or greater degree than it (we are talking nanometers at Most over billions of years, this does not a liquid make)

wait. cancel post. gung-ho cannot be English. where did that phrase come from? China?

ok, yes. gōnghé, which is…an abbreviation for “industrial cooperative”? Like it was just a term for a worker-run organization? A specific U.S. marine stationed in China interpreted it as a motivational slogan about teamwork, and as a commander he got his whole battalion using it, and other U.S. marines found those guys so exhausting that it migrated into English slang with the meaning “overly enthusiastic”.

Despite all the talk about 'pedophiles' on tumblr, there is zero evidence that any CSA has been perpetrated by the people accused, there is zero evidence that any actual CSAM has been shared or surreptitiously circulated at any point. There is zero evidence.

Like, that's it. Despite all the bullshit, despite all the what-aboutisms, despite all the deliberate and constant misinterpretation, despite all the twisting and obfuscation, despite all the mass surveillance and gang-stalking of trans women, nobody has turned up a god damn fucking thing. And no screenshots of tumblr posts do not fucking count sorry!

Patrick McKenzie has a good article about BNPLs which explains this. I strongly recommend reading the whole thing, McKenzie is fantastic, but if you want the tl;dr, it is:

- BNPLs charge the retailer 6%, instead of the usual 3% that credit cards charge. Retailers accept this for high-cost, high-margin items because it induces people to spend more, and they assume no risk because the BNPL pays them right away.

- BNPLs aren't as risky as they sound, because unlike credit cards— who need to guess whether you're a default risk over a period of years— their exposure to you is limited to the scope of one purchase (and ofc people the Algorithm has determined are high-risk don't get shown the button in the first place)

- To manage the risk which does exist, they securitize the loans and sell them to financial markets

And what this means is I can now play music with an interface made up of pixel art old enough to rent a car

not sure golden order fundamentalism is intended to be a new game build