Design: 1972Production: 1972Manufacturer: Easy Edges, Inc., New YorkSize: 85 x 42.5 x 60; seat height 45.5 cmsMaterial: corrugated cardboard, fiberboard,round timberCardboard furniture came on the scene during the sixties as a cheap and light alternative to traditional furniture. At that time attempts were made to reinforce the support of the single-layer cardboard offered by using folds, tabs, slots, and other devices. Nevertheless, cardboard was not able to compete against plastic, which was just as light. Frank O. Gehry discovered a process that ensured cardboard furniture-making a new burst of popularity. “One day I saw a pile of corrugated cardboard outside of my office – the material which I prefer for building architecture models – and I began to play with it, to glue it together and to cut it into shapes with a hand saw and a pocket knife.”1 It was thus possible to transform massive blocks of cardboard into cardboard sculptures. Gehry named this material Edge Board: it consisted of glued layers of corrugated cardboard running in alternating directions, and in 1972 he introduced a series of cardboard furniture under the name “Easy Edges.”
The “Easy Edges” were extraordinarily sturdy, and due to their surface quality, had a noise-reducing effect in a room. The design theorist Victor Papanek, one of the first to address the ecological responsibility of designers, praised Edge Board as a useful application of a packing material to furniture. The “Easy Edges” were a great success and brought Gehry overnight fame as a furniture designer, but at the same time he was into a role he did not like. Even sales prices were no longer consistent with Gehry’s basic idea of offering furniture to suit anyone’s pocketbook. “ I started to feel threatened. I closed myself off for weeks at a time in a room to rethink my life. I decided that I was an architect, not a furniture designer … and I simply stopped doing it.”2 Gehry made an international breakthrough as an architect in the late seventies, among other things with the design of his private residence in Santa Monica, California, in 1978. Since 1986 Vitra AG has reproduced four models of his “Easy Edges.”
[1] Frank O. Gehry, quoted in Marilyn Hoffmann, “Liberated Design,” The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, April 19, 1972.[2] Frank O.Gehry, quoted in Frank Gehry and his Architecture, exhibitioncatalogue (Walker Art Center, 1989), 64Designer:Frank GehryFrank Gehry was one of the first designers to produce cardboard furniture, having created the Wiggle side chair in 1972. Manufacturers had been seeking an alternative to plastic since the 1960s but struggled to find anything that could compete with its light flexibility.At that time, cardboard was often just a single layer and attempts to reinforce it were made by folding and inserting tabs and slots. But Gehry, who was born in 1929, came up with a solution thanks in part to childhood spent playing in his grandfather’s hardware store every Saturday morning, building villages and cities from scraps of plywood.After a stint as a truck driver and a radio announcer, Gehry turned to architecture and eventually graduated in the 1950s.
According to Vitra, the Swiss contemporary furniture company that has produced Gehry’s cardboard furniture designs since 1986, the architect saw a pile of corrugated cardboard outside his office one day and began to experiment. He was already using cardboard to build architecture models and realised that it became very strong when glued together.The resulting series of furniture was called Easy Edges and included the Wiggle side chair. The furniture was made by gluing layers of card in alternating directions. The Wiggle chair and table were hugely successful but Gehry was unhappy because the prices did not conform to his philosophy that furniture should be affordable to all.Gehry abandoned furniture design and returned to architecture. His most recognisable design is probably the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Last October, he was appointed joint architect with Foster + Partners to design the High Street phase of the Battersea Power Station development in London.VitraWiggle Side ChairInformationsProduits de la familleDesigner
Wiggle Side ChairFrank Gehry, 1972L'architecte Frank Gehry est connu pour son utilisation de matériaux inhabituels. Avec sa série de meubles "Easy Edges", il réussit à donner une nouvelle dimension esthétique à un matériau aussi banal que le carton. La forme sculpturale de la Wiggle Side Chair lui permet de se démarquer. Même si étonnamment simple en apparence, il est construit avec le talent éprouvé d'un architecte, ce qui la rend non seulement très confortable, mais aussi durable et robuste.2)Matériau : carton ondulé, chants en panneau de fibre dure naturelle.Frank Gehry (1929) est autant critiqué qu’admiré. Il est surtout connu pour ses réalisations architecturales, comme le Guggenheim à Bilbao, le Walt Disney Concert Hall à Los Angeles, ou plus récemment la Fondation Louis Vuitton à Boulogne. Son style est aisément reconnaissable, fait de courbes et de lignes spectaculaires, d’éléments défiant les lois de la construction. Il travaille d’abord avec des papiers qu’il froisse et tord pour trouver la forme qui lui convient, avant de la traduire sur l’ordinateur.
L’architecte a aussi eu une activité de designer, en particulier dans les années 70 et 80 .Gehry avait expérimenté dès les années 1960 de nouvelles techniques de production, et s’intéressait aux matériaux peu chers et abordables. Ces recherches aboutiront à la série des Easy Edges, dont la Wiggle Side Chair est la pièce la plus connue. Conçue en 1972, elle est un hommage à la chaise Zig-Zag de Rietveld (1934). Gehry utilise d’épaisses plaques de carton laminées, disposées à angles droits et collées entre elles. Cette technique est proche de l’aggloméré, et qui donne à la chaise une apparence de solidité. Impression qui contraste avec la nature malléable du matériau, et les formes ondulées de la chaise, qui la rendent plaisante, et légère à l’œil. L’utilisation du carton ne partait pas seulement d’une recherche esthétique, elle avait aussi un but social et politique. Intéressé par le mouvement Anti-Design, il s’empare de certaines de leurs thématiques.