29 minute read
Essay
from Disegno #34
by Disegno
Essential Forms There are several proposed derivations for the word “pastis”, but all swim in similar waters. The French aperitif, an anise liquor typically served diluted, may take its name from the French “pastiche”, the Occitan “pastís”, or the Provençal “pastisson”, all of which refer to ideas of mixture and combination.
It is, as such, an unusual name for Julien Renault’s new collection of wooden chairs and bistro tables for Danish furniture brand Hay: as picture perfect a representation of brasserie dining as you are likely to find. “It’s very classic,” acknowledges Renault, who says that his design practice is driven by an appreciation of essentialism and a preference for careful detailing as a mode of “beautifying the ordinary”. “I like to have something that is enough to tell everything,” Renault explains. “I need a click – a detail that, when I have it, I have the whole design and can build around that.”
In the case of Pastis, this click is a subtly curving wooden profile that serves as an armrest in the chair and a leg in the table. It is a beautiful, characterful element, but not one that distracts from the seeming purity of the collection; were you to ask someone to sketch an archetypal wooden chair, there is a good chance the outcome would resemble Pastis. “Hay said it’s the most mature chair they’ve ever done,” Renault notes, “maybe even timeless in a way. But I had a particular atmosphere in mind that I wanted to create when designing this.” Rather than revelling in mixture and combination to create a brasserie atmosphere, however, Pastis’s visual simplicity could suggest an exercise in reduction and purification. It is a particularly chair-like chair; a tablelike table. Undiluted, if you will.
Yet there is no such thing as a Platonic chair – the archetypal forms we inherit and rework are culturally determined, having been shaped by contingent historical factors such as material availability, production capabilities, cost, and aesthetic taste. One chair is no more essentially chair-like than any other – the designs we deem timeless are, in fact, mongrel mixtures of elements that might easily have been otherwise. Take Pastis’s curved profile, for instance. “That’s from After Life,” explains Renault phlegmatically. “The Netflix soap.” While watching the programme during lockdown, Renault noticed a side table set in the background of a scene filmed in an English tearoom. “I just saw the shape of the armrests I wanted in its legs,” he says. “So I sketched it and sent it to Hay.”
It is a novel mixture: a classic form that has found renewal through happenstance and Netflix streaming. Seeming purity, as ever, owes a debt to serendipity. “I just thought it was a nice shape to translate into a chair and table,” summarises Renault. “I found that curve and, suddenly, the atmosphere I had wanted was there.”
Words Oli Stratford
One Startup’s Trash What compels humans to shove things into canals? Whatever the answer, the urge to turf humanmade objects into humanmade waterways leaves cities with a problem: an underwater wasteland of shopping trolleys, bicycles and, increasingly, e-scooters.
If you live somewhere where they’re legal, electrified rental vehicles in acid-bright colours will be a familiar sight. Micromobility startups flush with venture capital have brought an estimated 360,000 e-scooters to streets across Europe. But when these vehicles’ batteries die and their GPS goes on the blink – say, for instance, when someone pushes them into a canal – they fall off grid, becoming a rusting hunk of metal that leeches toxic chemicals into the environment.
Take Malmö, a canal-ringed city on the coast of southern Sweden. In recent years e-scooters have been dredged from Malmö’s waterways by the city, aided by the involvement of volunteers. “We recovered 250 scooters last year,” reveals diver Pero Rasič. “We tried to contact the companies but they didn’t want to hear.”
One local design studio did hear, however. When Christian Svensson, Jingbei Zheng, Peder Nilsson and Oskar Olsson, the founders of Andra Formen, read about the divers’ work in the local papers, they decided to engage in some guerrilla urban-waste recovery, planning to utilise the e-scooters as a repository of aluminium and other resources. Andra Formen approached Malmö’s divers, who readily agreed to go on an e-scooter fishing trip. The next challenge was taking the recovered vehicles apart. “They’re not made to be recycled or repaired,” says Nilsson. “There are hundreds of different types of screws and other parts are glued together. You need an axle grinder to take them apart.”
Andra Formen took a nose-to-tail approach to developing the retrieved e-scooters into a new series of household objects: the E-metabolism series. Large pieces such as the steering column have been Frankensteined into chairs and an angled desk light, while the conductive metals have been used to create haptic lamps that respond to touch with a rainbow display. Across the collection, branding was kept intact: Andra Formen wants the pieces’ former incarnations to remain recognisable, so as to acknowledge the waste piling up in waterways. “If the scooter companies start talking to us, then they have to realise there is a problem,” explains Svensson. “Then they will be held responsible.” The trademarked logos blaring from the designs are confrontational, daring corporations to claim their waterlogged progeny with a copyright infringement claim. “Our aim is to start a discussion,” says Zheng. “Hopefully the companies will have a better system in the future.”
Finding ways to repurpose these e-scooters has become necessary given the rate at which the vehicles are replaced. “We read that it takes two years for one to pay for itself,” says Olsson, “but their average lifespan is only nine months.” Andra Formen’s local supply of waterlogged waste may be about to dry up, however, with Sweden having moved to ban the culprits from being ridden anywhere but the road from September 2022. “It’s the end of the line for e-scooters on pavements,” said infrastructure minister Tomas Eneroth. “Playtime’s over.”
Words India Block
Image by Fabian Frinzel.
The Everywhere Chair
When I first moved to London in 2014, I used to play a game of “name that chair” while walking through the city. I had just taken up a job as a design curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), and while I was well versed in the canon of architecture and urbanism, any design object smaller than a shed seriously challenged my historical and critical reflexes.
Words Brendan Cormier Images Philippe Thibault
Were you to ask me what Thonet was at the time, I might have told you it was a French pastis. As a panicked corrective, I set upon a rapid study of the 20th century’s great chairs – figuring that such knowledge constituted the lowest bar for being called a design curator – and put together a kind of cheat sheet that could protect me from any embarrassing future exchange with colleagues.
The chair I came across the most was the 1930s Tolix Chaise A by Xavier Pauchard. It’s an easy one to spot. Made of pressed sheet metal, it has a distinct silhouette and comes in a variety of bright colours, which are often set in contrast with a restaurant or café’s otherwise muted colour palette. It’s a 20thcentury chair that made a lot of sense for the 21stcentury food and drink industry: it provided a punchy accent note in Instagram photos to drive online interest, and its metal body made it long-lasting and versatile enough for indoor and outdoor use. It also matched well with what was probably – and unfortunately –
the dominant aesthetic of the early 2010s: a kind of industrial-nostalgia-chic replete with Edison lightbulbs, unfinished wooden surfaces, and random cast-iron parts from factory surplus sales.
It was a genuine thrill to spot my first Tolix, providing validation that my chair knowledge was improving. It became apparent rather quickly, however, that this wasn’t a rare find. Tolix was experiencing a moment of raging popularity in post-recession London. And quickly thereafter, everywhere, it seemed. In Shenzhen, for instance, where I regularly travelled for work from 2014 to 2018, I saw the cafés and restaurants in the popular nightlife districts of OCT-Loft and Shekou begin to fill up with the Chaise A. The same went for other places I visited: a studio in Toronto; a snack bar in Bangkok; a creative district in Dubai. More than its Instagram-friendliness and rugged functionality, the Chaise A seemed to be playing another role. It served as an immediate signifier of “design”, in that annoyingly superficial and pecuniary sense of the term. A Chaise A meant that the host venue met some basic – if fleeting – criteria of cool and, with that, had a licence to charge more for everything.
Like all things that ride on a rubric of trends, the Chaise A has likely started its slow decline into the unfashionable. Its ubiquity has already been noted. In January 2019, Vox published an article about the chair titled ‘The Metal Chair that’s in Every Restaurant’, highlighting how the Chaise A is, unusually, available for purchase at style guardians such as Design Within Reach, high street mainstays like Urban Outfitters, restaurant-specific retailers including Superior Seating, and at bargain sellers like Bob’s Discount Furniture – all at the same time, all at wildly different price points. Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, uses a distressed metallic version as her main work chair (which either means she doesn’t work very much, or, like the chair, has a back of steel), while Leon, the popular fast-food chain, provides red versions in all of its restaurants.
Just two months after the Vox piece, Vice waded into the world of design criticism with an excoriating hit-piece bluntly titled ‘Dear Restaurants: This Chair Sucks’. Simply referring to the offending item as “The Chair”, without ever mentioning its actual name, the piece equates it to a disease that has taken over the restaurant world, subjecting sitters everywhere to millions of hours of discomfort. Clearly, the Chaise A must go.
All of this mystified me. How did this chair become so popular? Its manufacturer Tolix was hardly a global brand. It had no major marketing campaigns that I knew of. It didn’t fit the model of any other company that achieves global domination. And yet, in Chaise A, it had seemingly produced a chair that had joined a limited group of designs both celebrated and reviled for their ubiquity. Perhaps a closer look at these chairs could offer some clues.
For decades, the all-injection-moulded-plastic chair referred to as a monobloc – more a type of chair than a specific design – was widely derided (and then partly revered) by design enthusiasts for its worldwide success. The monobloc was popular because it was cheap, but its global spread was aided by the fact that
no patent was filed when early versions went to market in the 1970s. It meant that anyone with some plastic pellets, and an (admittedly expensive) industrial mould could get into the business. While most experts generally pinpoint mass-market monobloc production as having started in France, different companies around the world, from the US, to Italy, to Taiwan, jumped in, fuelling the global expansion of this chair type. Commenting on how ubiquity gives the chair a peculiar, placeless effect in 2011, media scholar Ethan Zuckerman sharply remarked: “The Monobloc is one of the few objects I can think of that is free of any specific context. Seeing a white plastic chair in a photograph offers you no clues about where or when you are.” Perhaps as a defence against this placelessness, the city of Basel banned this chair from public space between 2008 to 2017.
Lovely as Zuckerman’s quote is, there have been other chairs that have had the same non-place effect before. Take the case of Thonet (N.B. not a French pastis). Chairs by Gebrüder Thonet were the first to attain an impressive global reach, having been pioneered by Michael Thonet before being carried on by his sons in the middle of the 19th century. Using a novel manufacturing technique of steam-bending beechwood into elegant frames, the company implemented ingenious methods to reduce costs and reach new markets in Europe and further afield. Flipping through images in the V&A’s photograph archive, I can find examples of the distinctive bentwood frame popping up all over the place: a shot by André Kertész of a French holiday town in 1929; a desolate diner from Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958); hungry children on a Bradford estate captured by Don McCullin in 1978; an anonymous album called ‘Views of Africa’ from 1910, showing a Thonet on a veranda in a Ugandan village. A friend of mine likes to collect archival images of bentwood chairs in Iran, where curiously, they are called “Polish Chairs” (Sandali-ye Lahestani) due to the 120,000 Polish refugees who came to Iran during the Second World War, who presumably brought some of their bentwoods with them.
Unlike the creators of the monobloc, Michael Thonet was savvy enough to acquire a patent in 1852, which gave his company protection for giving “wood various curves and forms by cutting and regluing.” When this expired in 1869, however, the market was flooded with bentwood furniture: pieces that were often exact copies of what Thonet was offering, marketed with the same model names. The companies J & J Kohn and Mundus, the latter of which was formed from a group of smaller bentwood manufacturers, were major competitors, and would later merge with Gebrüder Thonet in 1921 to become the largest furniture manufacturer in the world.
As cunning a business as Gebrüder Thonet was, its ascendance to global chair status was only aided by the incredible amount of copied versions coming onto the market. Although design enthusiasts may shriek at this statement, the brutal truth is that most people don’t care who makes a chair and they definitely don’t know how to look for the clues that would help distinguish one manufacturer from another. In those photos I mentioned in the V&A archives, I can’t tell if I’m looking at authentic Thonet chairs or ones from their competitors. To make these distinctions is simply to recognise who is getting paid. At some point in a chair’s global rise, the idea of the chair (its desirability, its use, its spread) becomes more interesting than who is making money from it.
A handful of other chairs could also be thrown into the mix. Alvar Aalto’s Stool 60, produced by Artek and knocked off in abundance by Ikea with its Frosta; Arne Jacobsen’s 3107; the Eames DSS stacking chair; Emeco’s 1006 Navy chair. All these have a few crucial things in common: they are sturdy, stackable, and have the potential to be made cheaply. Most importantly, they’ve been copied endlessly.
Like any good brand, the Tolix story is well documented – published enthusiastically and in almost mythological terms on the company’s website. It begins in Burgundy in 1908 with an industrial sheet-metal manufacturer
named Xavier Pauchard. Pauchard discovered how sheet metal could be protected from rust by dipping it in molten zinc and, a decade later, he established a furniture business that would eventually go by the name of Tolix, turning galvanised steel into pieces of furniture suitable for outdoor use. By 1934, Pauchard had designed the first iteration of the Chaise A, which sparked some early enthusiasm: namely, it was used in the maiden voyage of the Normandie ocean liner to New York City in 1935, and in 1937 the chair was featured at the Paris Universal Exhibition. As a practical café chair, however, it didn’t stack well, so the design was refined over the next two decades until 1956, when the classic Tolix we know today was released (25 chairs could be now stacked to a height of 2.3m).
In the 50s and 60s the company was thriving, servicing a booming post-war economy driven by spa towns, beachside resorts, and street cafés, which all required ample seating. In addition to the Chaise A, the company also produced a bar stool, the Tabouret H, which has seen its own meteoric rise, and several variations of both chair and stool. In the 70s, the brand got an additional boost when Terence Conran, founder of Habitat and leading champion of “good design” in the UK, extolled the virtues of the chair’s simple design, stocking it in his shops. Incidentally, I have spotted a tattered Chaise A behind the Design Museum, which Conran founded, as well as stacks of blue, white and red versions in the back-of-house area of the Conran-owned Bibendum restaurant, surely both legacies of this boosterism.
By the early 2000s, however, the company was in trouble. Some of its larger contracts were drying up and it faced financial difficulties. In 2004, when a court order threatened the company’s liquidation, Chantal Andriot, who had joined the company in 1974 as its chief financial officer, made the bold decision to take over Tolix and rescue the brand. Andriot implemented a host of changes, including product personalisation, factory modernisation, and some attempts at brand protection.
In 2018, I met with Kilian Schindler, a Karlsruhebased industrial designer, at Salone del Mobile in Milan. He was tending to the Tolix stand at the sprawling furniture fair, showcasing several new products made under his creative direction of the company. He had been hired by Andriot in 2014, in part to think of ways to evolve the Tolix brand. I first came across Schindler’s name in 2015, with a project he curated called Face to Face, in which eight designers and studios including Konstantin Grcic, Formafantasma, and Bethan Laura Wood artfully reinterpreted the Chaise A. The project can be seen as research into what constitutes the essential qualities of a chair – what makes a Tolix a Tolix. It’s an important question when your business is creating new works that diverge from the original while retaining its core spirit.
This is perhaps the biggest challenge for legacy brands such as Tolix. How can you continue to capitalise on the success of your big hit, while testing the market with new designs as a hedge against any future decline in sales? Emeco, producer of the iconic Navy Chair, is in a similar situation. Over the past few years, it has either commissioned small updates to its classic chair, such as Jasper Morrison’s upholstered Navy Officer, or else completely new designs from the likes of Barber Osgerby, Naoto Fukasawa and Norman Foster. Again, Gebrüder Thonet provide an early precedent. Although models such as the Thonet 14, designed in 1859, continued to be bestsellers for decades, by the turn of the 20th century the company had begun inviting Viennese designers to add to its catalogue, commissioning Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, and Josef Hoffmann. In the late 20s, Thonet took an even bolder step by swapping beechwood for tubular steel and producing some of the most iconic furniture pieces of the modern movement, including Marcel Breuer’s B32 and B33 chairs, Mies van der Rohe’s MR Chair, and the Chaise Longue by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand.
With these challenges in mind, I mentioned to Schindler my interest in visiting the Tolix factory to see how the chairs are made, and how the enterprise works today. Both him and Andriot, who was also present at the stand, happily obliged. We set a date for two weeks.
The Tolix factory is situated in an industrial park on the outskirts of Autun, a small city nestled in the hills of Burgundy with charming Roman ruins and a medieval cathedral. The factory itself is modestly sized. When Andriot took over the company, she was working with just 20 employees, but has grown it to 65 employees since then. A lot of effort went into modernising the machinery, and the factory was retrofitted to meet high environmental standards. All of this shows. When I go on a tour of the shop floor, I see a clean, well-organised space, neatly divided into workstations
that correspond to the manufacturing process. There are five different components: the legs; an X-brace; the seat; the back; and a tubular steel back frame. After the sheet metal is cut, the parts go to various stations to be pressed into form. This is more laborious than I expected. The legs themselves require 12 different stamping processes to get their distinctive shape. After this, the parts are spot-welded together, buffed and painted. Everything is made to order, customisable to a degree in terms of colours, finishes, and varnishes, as well as the occasional addition of words, logos or patterns, which has been important for the business.
The mood is remarkably relaxed. Several workers take a quick break from their station to welcome me and say hi to the sales manager walking me around. It’s an efficient workspace, pumping out a steady amount of product, but without the stress of the more hardcore assembly line I might have imagined. If I were to ever work in a factory, this would be ideal. Later, however, I’m told that retention is difficult. There is a loyal contingent of older workers, but younger employees tend to work only six to eight month stints before moving on to non-factory jobs.
Andriot offers to show me something else that may pique my interest just a short drive away. In the car, she talks passionately about her love of colours, landscapes, and how she enjoys painting at home. She likes to think of herself as having a creative eye, and half-jokingly lists herself as one of Tolix’s designers on the brand’s website. Her insistence on being seen as creative is likely a tic developed from decades of having to convince people that someone with a background in finance can take a creative lead. And, indeed, Andriot has made several design decisions since taking over the company, including bringing back a range of colours and personalisation options. Her priority, however, was to position Tolix as a design company – something the Pauchard family never quite embraced. For them, Tolix was simply supplying useful furniture. Andriot wanted to shine a light on what they had been neglecting – a good design story.
We pull up to an anonymous and slightly dilapidated warehouse, and suddenly this neglect becomes clear. It’s a vast storeroom of dust-covered Tolix ephemera, collected over the course of a century of operation. Andriot takes me to one room in particular, packed to the brim with different chairs: a taxonomy of the different experiments and iterations Pauchard toyed with in coming up with the Chaise A and other products. Little of this is properly catalogued and so a detailed design history of the company is at risk of being lost.
At some point Andriot asks me bluntly what the point of my journey is and I begin to feel flustered. I wanted to know why and how Tolix got everywhere. And now that I’ve seen the factory, it’s clear that this 65-person, lean manufacturing unit is not the powerhouse creating the design’s massive global supply. I want to know a bit more about the copies, so I inquire how they feel about knock-offs. Andriot lets out a sigh. She doesn’t like them, she says.
They are often made poorly but presented as Tolix chairs, which isn’t good for the brand. She tells me a few measures they’ve taken to counteract this. One is to work with lawyers to trademark the brand. Copyright law varies from country to country but, in general, legislation prevents mass-produced utilitarian objects such furniture and clothing from having strict protection. This is one reason why trademarks (ie logos) have taken off. While you can’t sue someone for making a bag shaped like a Louis Vuitton design, you can sue for the LV logos printed all over it. With this in mind, Andriot has implemented a small design change to the chair – stamping the Tolix logo on the back. Prior to this, the chairs had no explicit marker of authentication. Schindler, however, is more ambivalent about the issue. He cites the example of Vuitton, whose bags are bootlegged everywhere, yet the brand still thrives. He sees knock-offs as playing a potentially supportive role, increasing brand awareness. Once you build enough recognition, you will gain customers who want to invest in the real thing.
At the end of an all-too-short day, I say goodbye to my generous hosts, and am graciously given a lift to the train station. I feel, on one hand, uplifted by what I’ve seen: a legacy manufacturer, still managing
to keep an industrial operation going in France, with high standards of product quality and labour practice. On the other hand, it’s also clear that I’ve only just seen the tip of an iceberg buoyed up by an exponential amount of reproductions. To peer beneath the surface would rapidly complicate the picture.
There are thousands of paths you can follow online to find Tolix chairs both real and fake. Knowing where a retailer is sourcing their product, however, is a little bit trickier. Even chairs explicitly marketed as Tolix Chaise A will not always lead you to an authentic provider. The easiest tell as to whether something comes from the Tolix factory is price point. Design Within Reach and the Conran Shop, for instance, market their chairs at around the £300 mark and are careful to include images that clearly show the trademark stamped on the back. Most other retailers will offer knock-off versions of the chairs for substantially less. Even shopping at a big-name retailer is no guarantee that they are sourcing their product from Tolix.
As a case in point, a search on Walmart’s official website for “metal chairs” results in dozens of different offers for the same Chaise A-style chair, all cheap but all at slightly different price points and in slightly different colours and finishes, from companies you’ve never heard of. The language reads like a malfunctioning SEO-optimisation algorithm: “Furmax Set of 4 Metal Dining Chairs, Black $124.99”; “SmileMart Dining Chair, Set of 4, Black $155.43”; “Aiden Design Metal Dining Chairs with Wooden Seat, Set of 4, Gun Metal Gray $229.86”; “Costway Set of 4 Style Metal Side Dining Chair Wood Seat Stackable Bistro Café $229.99”; “Flash Furniture Commercial Grade Metal IndoorOutdoor Stackable Chair Orange $81.48.” And on and on. There are dozens of entries like this, all essentially hawking the same chair.
I’ve lost several hours going down internet rabbit holes looking up these companies. Sometimes you get a straightforward website, like with Furmax’s About Us page, which clearly states it is a furniture producer based in Ningbo, China. Flash Furniture brings you to an American site which requires a login and password, and which lists an address in Georgia, but another Google entry states that its manufacturing is in China. Smilemart brings you to a Nepalese site selling face cream. Googling most of these company names won’t lead you to a company website at all, but to Amazon, Wayfair, and countless other e-commerce sites, all selling the same thing.
Where Google fails, Alibaba wins. Since much of its traffic is for wholesale export, the Chinese e-commerce website is a treasure trove of manufacturing information. Eager to visit a factory, I started searching for Tolix on the site, and encountered the same Twitter-bot-runamok language: “Foshan vintage sedie metal tolixs sillas chair” and “Do old Distressed Industrial Metal Dining Side Chairs tolix chairs metal chairs,” with hundreds of suppliers to choose from. Manufacturers are clearly marked, with more prosaic names such as Bazhou Dongduan Mingyou Furniture Factory or Langfang Lefeng Furniture Co. For each company, there is also a company profile, which lists the factory location, range of employees, a breakdown of the regional markets it supplies to, and factory inspection certification. Additionally, these profiles often come with promotional videos that show the factory floor in action. I had been planning a trip to China to see
how off-brand Tolix chairs were made, and here, with just a few clicks, I was watching it, admittedly in shaky phone-camera video, from the comfort of my own home.
My resolve to see a factory remained fixed, however, and I narrowed my search to Foshan, one of the main furniture manufacturing cities in China, and also close enough to Shenzhen to make a day-trip possible. Once I had noted down a handful of sites, I asked my Shenzhen colleague, Siyun, to see if she could contact them to ask if any would be open to us making a site visit. Siyun suggested that we needed a good excuse, and so she proposed we go with a local product designer who was familiar with the area; I would pose as her client. Qiyun Deng, a designer for the Shanghai-based design practice Benwu Studio, had been spending the past few years in Foshan, working with injection-moulding companies to refine a set of bio-plastic tableware
A search on Walmart results in dozens of different offers for the same Chaise A-style chair, all from companies you’ve never heard of.
that she had begun as a diploma project at ECAL in Switzerland. She graciously agreed to be our fixer.
We meet Qiyun at Foshan West Station, having taken the high-speed train from Shenzhen and passed through a large swathe of the Pearl River Delta, one of the most densely populated regions of the world and home to an outlandish amount of manufacturing. From the train station, it’s another hour-long taxi ride to the northern outskirts of the city, the landscape dissolving into a patchwork of fields punctuated by random residential towers, anonymous industrial sheds, and the constant rumble of trucks. Finally, we pull up at a shed on a barren street. From the outside there’s no indication of what goes on inside.
We’re greeted by the site manager, who kindly offers us water, as it’s a characteristically stifling and muggy day, as well as brochures. On entering the production site, we see some boxes of chairs ready for shipment, followed by piles of the back frames waiting to be welded. Workstations are somewhat chaotic: at one welding station a worker is using a Tolix chair as a work surface to weld other Tolix chairs. Around the corner, another with a grinder has set up a plywood sheet to stop sparks from hitting passers-by. At the stamping stations, large fans keep staff cool. Despite the relative shabbiness of the production space, the steps are identical to the production process I saw in France. I had come half expecting to discover some ingenious innovations in the design of the chair, making it possible to produce them at a fraction of the cost. The only corner-cutting I really saw was in health and safety regulations, and lower wages.
Tolix chairs are scattered everywhere in the space – in production, as chairs on the line and as props for the production of more chairs. It’s like a self-reproducing system: chairs making chairs. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot a lone Navy chair sat amongst the others. The site manager nods and says, “Ah yes, we can make that too.” I immediately imagine this loose framework of a space being rapidly reconfigured at a moment’s notice when an order from the other side of the world comes in for an Emeco knock-off.
Our tour lasts all of 15 minutes. There isn’t much to see beyond the production steps that I am now well versed in, and I’m conscious of overstepping my bounds, having already tested the manager’s patience and incredulity for our visit in the first place. Back in the taxi, I imagine setups similar to what I have just seen playing out a thousand times over across China: a barebones shed fitted with equipment that has likely been retooled many times over, pumping out orders for Tolix chairs and countless other things. I think about how these sheds are tethered to the world via online e-commerce behemoths such as Amazon and Alibaba, but also how a world of circulating imagery – from print magazines and coffee table books on design, to Pinterest boards, and interior renders on Behance – feeds into it, acting as an echo chamber for certain styles and objects. There’s a strangeness to typing “vintage metal chair” into a search engine in London one day and finding myself in a shed in the north of Foshan two days later that I can’t quite get over.
Qiyun suggests we see one other place while I’m in Foshan: Lecong Wholesale Furniture Market. It claims to be the world’s largest wholesale furniture market (“the world’s largest” being a common refrain here), stretching several kilometres along a main road in a series of multi-storey buildings filled to the brim with all the furniture you can imagine. We walk past a few of the more low-key establishments, which, in their eclecticism look like the furniture section of a charity shop on steroids. Then we get to the climax: the Louvre, a capacious high-end combination shopping mall, event space and hotel. We walk through corridors flanked by tastefully arranged showrooms before arriving in a colossal atrium, the floor largely filled with massage chairs and pool tables, surrounded by five storeys of more elegantly designed showrooms. Just beyond is a large open space for events, framed by neoclassical facades and a Calatrava-esque latticed column blooming into a roof-structure. It’s all ripped straight from the playbook of a Macau casino.
