Robin Day ( 25 de mayo de 1915 - 9 de noviembre de 2010)[1] ) fue un diseñador industrial de mobiliario británico. Day es conocido en especial por el diseño de la silla Polyprop inyectada en plástico, de la que se fabricaron más de 20 millones de unidades en todo el mundo. Fue la primera pieza de mobiliario que aprovechó las oportunidades de manufactura en masa de la tecnología de inyección en plástico. Fue premiado con la Chartered Society of Designers's Minerva Medal, el máximo premio que la Sociedad puede ofrecer, y además ganó numerosos premios a lo largo de su vida por su desempeño en el campo del diseño. Su esposa Lucienne Day (nacida en 1917) fue una notable diseñadora textil. Y junto con ella fueron la pareja de diseño británica más aclamada de la posguerra, siendo comparados a menudo con sus equivalentes y compatriotas de los Estados Unidos, Charles Eames y Ray Eames. ↑ Obituary in The Independent, viernes, 19 de noviembre 2010 Silla Hille de polipropileno (1963)
Sillón Hille de polipropileno (1967) Sofá Hille Forum (1964) - Habitat reissue pictured in 2007 Hille Polypropylene Armchair with ski base (1967) The Polypropylene stacking chair or Polyprop is a chair manufactured in an injection moulding process using polypropylene. It was designed by Robin Day in 1963 for S. Hille & Co. It is now so iconic, it was selected as one of eight designs in a 2009 series of British stamps of "British Design Classics." This is one of the very few chairs that after over 50 years is still in production and has been made in forty countries around the world, for schools, hospitals, airports, canteens, restaurants, arenas, hotels, as well as homes.[1] It is the best-selling chair in the world. The chair first appeared on the market in a choice of charcoal or flame red colours at a little under £3 in price. The side chair won a Council of Industrial Design (now the Design Council) award in 1965. The brief from Hille was for a low cost mass-produced stacking chair, affordable by all and to meet virtually every seating requirement.
Over time it became available in a wide variety of colours and with different forms of base and upholstery. These variations have included Series E for children, made in five sizes with lifting holes, and Polo with rows of graduated circular holes making it suitable for outdoor use. The one-piece seat and back was injection moulded from polypropylene, a lightweight thermoplastic with a high impact resistance. Polypropylene was invented by an Italian scientist, Giulio Natta, in 1954. ^ Description of Polypropylene stacking chairs in the The Frederick Parker Chair Collection ^ The People's Chair, Guardian 1999Aller à : , 9 novembre 2010 (à 95 ans) Buckinghamshire New University () Royal College of Art Royal Festival Hall, Barbican Centre, John Lewis (), Ercol (), Métro de Londres, British Overseas Airways Corporation, Pye Ltd. (), Habitat Officier de l'ordre de l'Empire britannique Robin Day (né en 1915 à High Wycombe au Royaume-Uni, et mort le 9 novembre 2010), est un designer anglais.
Robin Day naît à High Wycombe, lieu historique de la fabrication de la chaise. Il est diplômé du Royal College of Art en 1938[1]. En 1948, il ouvre son studio de designer avec sa femme, Lucienne Day (née Conradi, 1er janvier 1917 – 30 janvier 2010[2]), créatrice de textiles renommée. Au début des années 1960, il développe un concept de moulage par injection en produisant Polyprop 1962-1963[3], chaise qui fut la première à être réalisée en polypropylène moulé par injection. Son coût et ses propriétés mécaniques font de cette chaise empilable, produite à plus de 14 millions d'exemplaires, une référence mondiale du mobilier. « Le bon design doit remplir sa fonction, être bien construit et doit le montrer dans son allure. » This article is about the broadcaster. For the designer, see Robin Day (designer). Sir Robin Day (24 October 1923 – 6 August 2000) was a British political broadcaster and commentator. Day's obituary in The Guardian by Dick Taverne stated that "he was the most outstanding television journalist of his generation.
He transformed the television interview, changed the relationship between politicians and television, and strove to assert balance and rationality into the medium's treatment of current affairs". He was born in Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, the son of a telephone engineer who became a telephone manager. He attended Brentwood School from 1934 to 1938,[4] briefly attended the Crypt School, Gloucester, and later Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight. During and after World War II, between 1943 and 1947, he served with the army in East Africa, where he reached the rank of Captain but was demoted to Lieutenant as part of a cull of rear-echelon jobs. After the war Day attended St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and, while a student, was elected president of the Oxford Union debating society. Day also took part in a debating tour of the United States, run by the English-Speaking Union. He was called to the Bar at Middle Temple in 1952, but practised only briefly. In his memoirs he recorded that he secured the acquittal of a lorry-driver accused of indecent exposure by persuading the magistrates that the man had been "shaking the drops from his person" after urinating, and by getting the man's young wife to testify, wearing a tight sweater, that she and her husband enjoyed a healthy love life.
Day spent almost his entire working life in journalism. He rose to prominence on the new Independent Television News (ITN) from 1955, when he was the first British journalist to interview Egypt's President Nasser after the Suez Crisis. On television, he presented Panorama and chaired Question Time (1979–89), and on radio was presenter of The World at One from 1979 to 1987. His incisive and sometimes – by the standards of the day – abrasive interviewing style, together with his heavy-rimmed spectacles and trademark bow tie, made him an instantly recognisable and frequently impersonated figure over five decades. He became known in British broadcasting as 'the Grand Inquisitor' for his abrasive interviewing of politicians, a style out of keeping with the British media's culture of deference to authority that prevailed during the early days of his career. In 1958 he interviewed Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, in what the Daily Express called: "the most vigorous cross-examination a prime minister has been subjected to in public".
The interview turned Macmillan into a television personality, and was probably the first time that British television became a serious part of the political process. In the early 1970s, Day was involved on BBC Radio, where he proved an innovator with It's Your Line (1970–76). This was a national phone-in programme that enabled ordinary people, for the first time, to put questions directly to the prime minister and other politicians (it later spawned Election Call). He also presented The World at One, from 1979 to 1987. In 1981, he was knighted for his services to broadcasting. In October 1982, during a Newsnight interview with the Conservative Secretary of State for Defence John Nott, pursuing cuts in defence expenditure, he posed the question: "But why should the public, on this issue, as regards the future of the Royal Navy, believe you, a transient, here-today and, if I may say so, gone-tomorrow politician, [a reference to Nott's announcement that he was to stand down at the next General election] rather than a senior officer of many years?"
Nott rose, removed his microphone, and said "I'm sorry, I'm fed up with this interview. Really, it's ridiculous" and walked off the set. Nott's autobiography in 2003 was called Here Today Gone Tomorrow: Recollections of an Errant Politician. He was a regular fixture on all BBC general election night programmes from the 1960s until 1987. After leaving Question Time, he moved to the new satellite service BSB where he presented the weekly political discussion programme Now Sir Robin. When BSB merged with Sky Television, the programme continued to be broadcast on Sky News for a while. On the night of the 1992 General Election, Day resumed his role as interviewer, this time on ITN's general election night coverage, broadcast on ITV. In the mid-90s, he regularly contributed to the lunchtime Channel Four political programme Around the House and also presented Central Lobby for Central TV, the ITV franchise in the Midlands. The show was sometimes broadcast at the same time as his old programme, Question Time was being shown on BBC One.
For 25 years he campaigned tirelessly, and eventually successfully, for the televising of parliament – not in the interests of television, but of parliament itself. He claimed that he was the first to present the detailed arguments in favour, in a Hansard Society paper in 1963. Monty Python's Flying Circus often used Day as a reference, including the 'Eddie Baby' sketch in which John Cleese turns to the camera and states: 'Robin Day's got a hedgehog called Frank.' In another sketch, Eric Idle said he was able to return his 'Robin Day tie' to Harrods. He was also spoofed (as "Robin Yad") on The Goodies' episode Saturday Night Grease. Day appeared as himself on an instalment of the Morecambe & Wise show, in which he berates Ernie Wise in character. Then Eric Morecambe, acting as a TV presenter, says, "Sadly, we've come to the end of today's "Friendly Discussion with Robin Day". He was also frequently lampooned by the satirical TV programme Spitting Image. In this, his most famous examples of lampoonery were his interviews with the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher and how she would always give an answer somewhat vague to the question, and his breathing difficulties which affected him later in life.
"My name is Robin (deep breath) Day!" Day published two autobiographies; 'Day by Day' in 1975 and 'Grand Inquisitor' in 1989. In the 1959 General Election he stood as a Liberal Party candidate for Hereford but failed to win. In 1965, Day married Katherine Ainslie, an Australian law don at St Anne's College, Oxford, and they had two sons. The marriage was dissolved in 1986. One of the tragedies of his life was that his elder son never fully recovered from the effects of multiple skull fractures he sustained in a childhood fall. In the 1980s, Day had a coronary bypass, and he suffered from breathing problems that were often evident when he was on the air. He had always fought against a tendency to put on weight. As an undergraduate, he weighed 17 st 0 lb (108 kg; 238 lb), and claimed that, in the course of his life, he had succeeded in losing more weight than any other person. The broadcaster Joan Bakewell recalled that whilst he was professional when in the office: