Robin Day, trained at the Royal College of Art in the 1930s. He was a furniture designer, best known for his innovative design of the Polyprop Chair in 1963. This was manufactured from polypropylene, through injection moulding. This design became a trend setter for cheap, quality, mass manufactured, stackable chairs. Over 30 million have now been sold. Probably one of the most used chairs in the world is Robin Day’s Polyprop Chair of 1963, which continues to be manufactured to this day. Although the design has slowly evolved over the years, it is very popular as a stackable chair in schools, universities, canteens and conference venues. Revolutionary design, with a one piece seat and backrest, manufactured through injection moulding. Required extensive research into ergonomics, before the manufacturing process could begin. 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 1999It is now estimated that 50 million of the chairs are in circulation. Designed in 1962 and inexpensively moulded from the then-new thermoplastic material of polypropylene, it is often credited as the first plastic shell chair ever created. More than half a million are still made each year. But Day was responsible for far more than this one artefact, and his name will remain associated with postwar modernism as a whole. With his wife, the textile designer Lucienne Day, he produced work that reflected the mood of a society recovering from the privations of war. Throughout a seven-decade career he aimed to bring contemporary design to a mass market at an affordable price.
Though he had little time for the increasing role of fashion in his business, he remained convinced that good design could improve quality of life. Robin Day was born on May 25 1915 at High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, a town once renowned for its furniture manufacturing. He studied at High Wycombe Technical Institute, where he learned technical drawing, and later won a scholarship to High Wycombe School of Art. It was during this period that he was summoned to the home of Lucian Ercolani, founder of the furniture maker Ercol, who offered Day a job with the promise of £1,000 a year. Although tempted, Day had other ideas, and won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in London. (He did eventually design for Ercol, producing a chair in 2003). The RCA was a disappointing experience, as Day found it "all painting and sculpture" rather than three-dimensional design. But he maintained close ties with the institution after he graduated in 1938, taking advantage of its table tennis facilities if nothing else.
It was at an RCA dance in 1940 that he met a fellow student, Lucienne Conradi. Neither danced, but they "talked and talked". Keen to help Lucienne with her diploma show, Day stepped off a ladder on to the decorated dinner plates that she was planning to exhibit. Two years later they married. Asthma ruled out active service during the war and Day taught at the Beckenham School of Art instead. There he met a fellow teacher, Clive Latimer, who went on to share Day's first great success as a designer when, in 1948, the pair won the International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Three years after winning the competition Day received his first major commission, to design seating for the Royal Festival Hall. He also designed a series of rooms for the Homes & Gardens pavilion at the Festival of Britain, which he filled with radical steel and plywood furniture. When Day found it impossible to find any modern textiles to accompany his work, he asked Lucienne to create something suitable.
The result was Calyx, an abstract floral pattern produced by Heal's furniture store. Later that year the pattern went on to win the Gold medal at the Milan Triennale. Though the couple worked side by side in their studio at home on Cheyne Walk in London for nearly 50 years, the collaboration during the Festival of Britain was one of the rare occasions when they worked directly together. By the time the five-month-long festival was over, however, they had become Britain's first design stars. This recognition was helped by the fact that they brought a much-needed dose of glamour to postwar Britain. Together they featured in countless magazine spreads and, in 1954, as a debonair couple in a Smirnoff vodka advertising campaign, surrounded by their furniture and textile designs. By then Day had been working for five years with the British company Hille, which he was instrumental in transforming from a small cabinet making firm into a producer of innovative and modern furniture. Nor was Day short of marketing nous.
When he came up with the Polyprop chair, for example, he sent several hundred of the chairs to architects, designers and journalists. Soon the stackable chair was being described in the press as "the most significant development in British mass-produced chair design since the war". Durable, stylish and cheap, it was bought in bulk by airports, canteens, hospitals and restaurants. That same year, 1962, Lucienne Day was named Royal Designer for Industry for her textiles. The award came three years after Robin Day had won the same distinction for "sustained excellence in aesthetic and efficient design for industry". Though best known for his furniture design and public seating for the likes of the Barbican Centre, London Underground and Gatwick Airport, Day also created televisions and radios for the British electronics company Pye. As the Sixties got into full swing he even worked on aircraft interior design for BOAC, as well as on bold carpet designs for Woodward Grosvenor. As fashion and economic conditions changed in the 1970s and 1980s, however, there was less appetite for Day's particular brand of modernism.
Lucienne applied herself to creating one-off art fabrics; Day worked for Hille. The couple also continued the consulting work they had been doing with John Lewis since 1962, during which time they developed the store's "house style". In the 1990s Habitat started to include some of Day's most celebrated pieces of furniture in its collection, including the Forum sofa (designed in 1964), and the Polyprop. This, along with new projects with companies including the British manufacturer SCP and the Italian firm Magis, brought Day's work to a new generation of admirers. Aside from design, Day was passionate about outdoor pursuits. He embraced extreme sports at an unusually advanced stage in life, explaining they allowed him to "switch off", and explored the Atlas Mountains, the Himalayas and Munros in Scotland. At 61 he spent 12 weeks skiing 2,500 miles across Norway, Finland and Sweden, taking in the countries' highest summits, shooting wild animals for food and sleeping in snow-holes. When he was 76 he became one of the oldest men to climb Mount Kenya.