October 21, 2020
Boundaries between art and furniture
A Chair that successfully bridges the boundaries between art and furniture.
1. The Story Behind Frank Gehry's Iconic Wiggle Design
A pioneer of postmodernism, Canadian architect Frank Gehry is known for his bold architectural features and unusual materials, such as Guggenheim Museum, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Gehry's designs go beyond the ordinary building but are true works of art. He also started to work on smaller projects and experimentation with innovative design, such as his iconic furniture series wiggle chair designed between 1969-72. It was started in the 1960s Frank Owen Gehry was playing with the corrugated fiberboard used for the building model at hand, glued it and then cut it to create "Easy Edges" mostly made of corrugated paper. He succeeded in bringing a new aesthetic dimension to such an everyday material as cardboard built in a low-cost furniture solution.
“I discovered that by alternating the direction of layers of corrugations, the finished board had enough strength to support a small car, and a uniform, velvety texture on all four sides,”
2. Design of wiggle chair
The Wiggle Chair is named after its roundabout shape of the seat. Surprisingly simple in appearance but the sculptural form of the Wiggle Side Chair makes it stand out among all the chairs. Constructed with the consummate skill of an architect, making it not only very comfortable but also durable and robust. The seat loops back and forth to resemble loose folds form and straightens out at the top to create the chair's back. Approximately 60 layers of cardboard are held together by hidden screws with a fibreboard edging, then a layer of hardboard is attached on each side to compact the layers of what Gehry named "edge board" and create a more durable surface.
3. How Wiggle Chair in today furniture industry.
The cardboard collection gained Gehry an international reputation as a furniture designer, however, he decided that it wasn't his calling, he was worried that this would overshadow his reputation as an architect so he stopped the production in 1973 only two years after the collection launched. The production on the Easy Edges collection resumed by Vitra in 1986. 
Early this year, Vitra launched a 90-minute film that explores the development of chairs from 1800 to the present-day. 125 chairs that can represent the ethos of a particular moment in time and reflect the production techniques with which they were created. You can recognise and understand an era – its social structures, its materials, techniques and fashions – by its chairs.
Visit: https://www.vitra.com/en-un/page/chair-times
