MATERIALI, PROCESSI E INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

MATERIALI, PROCESSI E
INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
USO CORRETTO DI MATERIALI E
TECNOLOGIE
Funzione
Tecnologia
Design
Materiale
Forma
Processo creativo è ….
… ricerca dell’equilibrio
Materiale
Forma
Funzione
Tecnologia
Design
You will notice quite of few chairs in this
presentation and with good reason:
new technology and materials frequently
developed for other areas of industry were often
applied to furniture production, fundamentally
shaping the changes that have occurred in chair
design this century.
This evolution in chair design and the
development of new materials and techniques
serves as a good illustration of the intimate
relationship designers have had with their vastly
expanding medium.
During the second half of the nineteenth
century, the chair became an industrialized
product, mainly as a result of the pioneering
research into the steam-bending of wood
laminates and later solid wood by Michael
Thonet.
Michael Thonet
Table, c.1885
Michael Thonet
Side Chair No.
14, c.1858
In the 1870's, Christopher Dresser designed some of the most
forward-looking metalwork to emerge from the nineteenth
century
Christopher Dresser
Tureen, 1869
Christopher Dresser
Decanter and Glasses, 1881
Christopher
Dresser
Teapots, 1885
A pioneer of modern design, and arguably Europe's first
industrial designer, Dresser explored the possibilities of
materials like glass, metal and ceramics, applying every
available advanced technique. He would combine inexpensive
materials with more luxurious ones such as ebony and
mahogany.
There is the same geometric
simplicity and contained functional
feel, but his work is more organic
and reflects his studies of plants
and animals.
Christopher Dresser
Tea Kettle, 1880
The Bauhaus, started by Walter Gropius in 1919
to be a "laboratory for mass consumption"
The Bauhaus
Dessau,
1925-1926
Marcel Breuer
"Wassily"
Armchair, 1925
Ludwig Mies
van der Rohe
Weissenhof
Chair, 1927
design and material choices that were
appropriate for mass production
This famous chair is closely related
to the cantilevered chair by
Ludwig Meis van der Rohe at the
Bauhaus at the same period.
Marcel Breuer
Chair B32, 1928
Mart Stam
Side Chair S33,
1926
Simultaneously Dutch architect
Mart Stam also designed a
chair that used his skills from
his experiments with bent
wood.
Le Corbusier
Grand Confort, 1928
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Barcelona Chair, 1928
Why was this tube construction technique such a dramatic
advancement in furniture design and manufacture?
First of all, it made possible a far more efficient method of
joining components. The parts could be welded together for
clean, strong joints, with no bulky structures.
Second, the tubes could be finished with chrome plating,
paint, enamel or other coloring systems to provide an
attractive durable protection.
Finally, the results of this system were lighter in appearance
and far stronger than wooden members of similar size. The
nature of wood required that joints be of substantial size to
give necessary strength. This is a good example of how
technological advances affect the way products are made and
how they look.
Ironically, chair designs such as these, which appear
very much to be machine-made, were in fact very laborintensive to produce and, therefore costly to
manufacture—an aspect that ran counter to the Bauhaus
philosophy.
It was realized that the true mass-production of Modern
furniture would only be possible if a form of mechanized
standardization was adopted. However, it was not until
after World War II that it became economically and
technically feasible to achieve this on a wide scale.
Alvar Aalto evolved a language of curvilinear
and organic forms with natural materials such as
plywood
Alvar Aalto
armchair, 1931
Cut from a single sheet of plywood and given
its final form without any joinery, this armchair
by Gerald Summers is purely simple in
construction.
Gerald Summers
armchair, c. 1934
Here are some more examples of the wide range
of materials being used and experimented with
by designers of the 30's.
While he had designed this Zig-Zag
chair in steel tubing a few years
earlier, Gerrit Rietveld responds to
the Breuer and van der Rohe
cantilevered steel chairs with a simple
wooden execution that was more
visually cohesive and seems to
anticipate the single-piece plastic
chairs that became possible in the
sixties.
Gerrit Rietveld
Zig-Zag chair,
1934
Gerrit Thomas Rietveld (1888-1964)
Zigzag child's chair Jesse
Wood, five-plywood, 1944
Collection: Centraal Museum, Gerrit Th.
Rietveld 2000 c/o Beeldrecht, Amstelveen
As a precursor to the
work of Eames and
Saarinen, the Landi chair
in the middle was made
of perforated aluminum
with thin splayed legs
and gained attention in
Switzerland, as it could
be entirely shaped by
machine.
Hans Coray
Landi chair,
1938
ALLUMINIO
Isotropo
Lavorabile
Densità 2600 Kg/m3
Modulo elastico 70 GPa
Resistenza ……
Hans Coray
Landi chair,
1938
As a precursor to the work of Eames and
Saarinen, the Landi chair in the middle was made
of perforated aluminum with thin splayed legs and
gained attention in Switzerland, as it could be
entirely shaped by machine. Although aluminum
is more costly than steel and was rarely seen in
the furniture industry of the 1930's, it was
deemed appropriate in this application because of
its high strength-to-weight ratio for use as a
furnishing in German Zeppelins.
The Butterfly chair is one of
the most copied chair designs
in recent history. The
original design used a leather
sling seat, which in later
models changed to canvas.
Grupo Austral
Butterfly chair,
1938
World War II had a dramatic and long-lasting effect on the
design and manufacture of consumer products.
In the 1940's, furniture
designers were excited by the
possibilities offered to them by
new laminates, new bending
techniques, and combinations
of laminated wood, metal and
plastic.
The laminated wood furniture prototypes that Charles
Eames and Eero Saarinen developed in 1940
involved experimenting with molded shells and
compound curves, and with electronic cycle-welding
borrowed from the automotive industry. Eames
applied these techniques of laminated wood forming to
produce molded leg splints, stretchers, aircraft parts
and glider shells that he developed for the Department
of the Navy during the war.
Charles Eames
Leg Splints,
1942
In 1946, Charles Eames exhibited
the first of his later famous chairs,
which he developed with his wife
Ray, composed of plywood shells,
including some mounted on steel rod
legs by means of a rubber-weld joint
attached with a new synthetic resin
developed for the war.
Charles and Ray Eames
LCM chair, 1945
Eames was personally involved in the
technology of all his designs and rejected the
primacy of aesthetics. "Thinking of how a
chair looks comes pretty far down the list of
things I worry about when designing," Eames
admitted. "I only think about how they look
in relation to how they are doing their job."
Using fiberglass, which was
developed in the war for aircraft
radar domes in 1942, Eames
developed the first fiberglass chair to
go into production.
This was the material he
and his collaborator Eero
Saarinen were looking for.
However Saarinen elected
to cover his shell to make
the Womb chair with foam
rubber padding rather than
leaving the fiberglass
exposed as Eames initially
did. Eames later offered an
upholstered version of his
plastic chair as well.
Eero Saarinen
Womb chair, 1948
But these forms were also easily
assimilated into new production
processes like plastics which flowed
easily into curved molds.
Plastica = + libertà di forma
The design dispenses with metal
blades and in their place uses safer
cross-hatched fabric blades which
were replaceable. This removed the
need for a protective cage and thus
contributed to the fan's stylish,
modern image.
The streamlined Bakelite Bandolero
fan (left) was produced by Biehl, the
electrical division of Singer, for the
Sears catalog.
With the advent of television on the
1940's, plastic molders tackled the
challenge of producing the larger onepiece cabinet by the same means that
had been used to mold smaller radio
housings using injection molding. A
1949 article in Modern Plastics
explained that a wood cabinet required
525 different construction operations
before the chassis could be installed; a
plastic cabinet required from 3 to 6
operations.
This, and the fact that production runs would be much faster,
contributed to a set that was as much as $100 less than wooden
television sets.
Weighing 250,000 pounds, this vertical press shot 35 pounds of
phenolic resin into a 20,000 pound mold within a seven minute
cycle to produce a 36" tall television cabinet for Admiral.
Eero Saarinen invented a onelegged pedestal chair, intending to
make it "all one thing... a structural
total" cast in one piece of material, in
this case plastic. After a two-year
period of extensive experimentation,
however, the durability and loadbearing capabilities of the glassreinforced plastic could not be
assured and the weightlessly elegant
chair was instead produced with an
aluminum stem and a reinforcedplastic shell. The stem was
subsequently painted to match the
shell
Eero Saarinen
Tulip chair, 1955
The MAA chair (below) designed in 1958 by George Nelson has
a molded plastic seat and backrest using innovative plastic shock
mounts. It earned the reputation for being the first plastic chair
with a moveable back.
George Nelson
MAA chair, 1958
Incidentally, this chair was only produced for one
year before it was withdrawn, owing to an
inherent design flaw. The rubber sockets, which
are welded to the back of the chair and connect
with a system of pivoting ball pins allowing the
back section to articulate through 90 degrees,
degrade under stress.
As the appeal of functionalism began to fade in favor or the new
pop culture of the 60's, designers continued to explore the new
pallet of materials and processes at their disposal.
Joe Colombo
Universale
chair, 1965
Plastics allowed the designer to
challenge the user's experience with
weight, color and form.
Joe Colombo experimented with synthetic
materials creating flexible furniture systems
and units that combined a variety of domestic
services into a single assembly. His chair was
the first of its kind to be injection molded in
one piece (with the exception of the legs).
Marco Zanuso
child's stacking chair,
1960's
Verner Panton
stacking chair, 1967
Borrowing a cantilevered shape dating back to Gerrit Rietveld's ZigZag design of 1934, shown again in the lower right picture, and
fulfilling Eero Saarinen's goal of making furniture completely of
plastic, Verner Panton's stacking chair was the first single-piece,
continuous construction to enter large scale production.
The Valentine typewriter by Ettore Sottsass for Olivetti is a departure
from the drab workaday designs of office machines. This typewriter is
designed using ABS and was conceived as a personal accessory. Light
and portable, this novel design was the "anti-machine machine", built
around a very common mechanism, it almost looks like a toy
Ettore Sottsass, Jr.
Olivetti Valentine typewriter, 1969
a new furniture material developed by Frank O. Gehry using laminated
layers of corrugated cardboard.
Cardboard's popularity began in the
60's with Peter Mudoch's Spotty
child's chair in 1963 made of
polyethylene-coated laminated kraft
paper. It was the first piece of
commercial furniture made of paper.
Inexpensive and durable, the chair
was sold as a flat, brightly
ornamented laminated sheets in
supermarkets and department stores
to be assembled at home by simply
folding along the pre-scored lines.
Peter Murdoch
Spotty child's
chair, 1963
Because of its possibilities, cardboard continues to be an
intriguing material today as shown here by the Suite
Cardboard Family by Oliver Leblois from 1995.
Oliver Leblois
Suite Cardboard Family, 1995
Frank Gehry 1992
Frank Gehry is an architect
who designs very unusual and
breathtaking buildings and
never does anything boring!
This is his ‘Power Play’ chair
made from plywood.
Phillippe Starck 1994
Starck is a wacky French
designer - designing
buildings, toothbrushes,
lemon-squeezers, furniture…
This television is interesting
because it is made from
compressed wood and
plastic that has been
recycled.
Polymer Processing
Materiali in un aereo di linea
Estrusione!
Il profilo della trafila
Flusso continuo
Sezione uniforme
Extrusion (cont’d)!
Calandre
Rigid
Sheet
Laminatura
Die
• Extruded Through Die
• Supported and Cooled
by a Stack of Polishing
Rolls
• Cut and Trimmed Once
Below Glass Transition
Temperature
• Sheet May be Used in
Thermoforming and
Compression Molding
Compression Molding
Softened sheet is!
placed in a mold then!
pressed into shape by!
compressive force.!
Compression Molding!
Compressive Force!
1!
2!
Part!
Trimming!
Soft Sheet!
3!
Thermoforming!
진공 성형(Vacuum Forming)!
Softened Sheet!
Atmospheric Pressure(14.7 psi)!
Part!
Mold!
Vacuum!
Blow Molding (중공 성형)
Blow Molding (cont’d)!
1!Parison Drop
2!Pre Blow
3!
Full Pressure
4!
5!Release
Pinch Bar
Mold!
Part!
Injection Molding Equipment
Barrel Unit"
The Reciprocating Screw!
Hopper!
(Filling) Throat!
Heating Coils!
Force, Torque!
From !
Injection Unit!
Nozzle!
Barrel!
Screw!