panton

Panton chairs as pews-substitutes.

St. Bartholomew’s Church interior by Jakub Berdych of Qubus.

and Ken Johnson wrote for New York Times in June 2005:

Verner Panton (1926-1998), the subject of an extraordinarily interesting exhibition at AXA Gallery, did not invent the 1960's, but he was one of the decade's most exciting and innovative furnishers. Today the Danish designer and architect is best known for a single object: the Panton chair. Created in 1967 and still in production, it was the first piece of furniture that could be made as a single piece of molded plastic -- a manufacturer's dream come true. It was cheap, stackable and comfortable to sit on.

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Classic Modernist design does have its playful tendencies, but it tends to favor mechanical kinds of play, for example, kindergarten blocks and Erector sets. ''Form follows function'' is a motto for mechanical design, and classic Modernist chairs like the Mondrianesque Rietveld chair appear to only grudgingly accept that they are meant to support human bodies.

Early Modernism tends also to favor values and sensibilities conventionally seen as masculine, and it is interesting to note that Panton's earliest chair, from 1953 -- a straight-edged, Bauhaus-style construction of bent chrome rod and a rectangular piece of suede -- is called the Bachelor Chair. It is handsome and coolly reserved. With its ''feminine'' curves, the Panton chair of the 60's, seems almost erotically eager for human contact. For Panton, the rule was ''form follows fantasy.''

Panton was designing a new world of consumerist freedom and pleasure, and while it is animated by the spirit of the child, it has a maternal aspect hovering over it. The Panton-designed environments depicted in large color photographs in the show appear dark, warmly cavernous and throbbing with soft, colored lights: they are womb-like. The Living Tower is like a womb for quadruplets. And you would have to be a militant anti-Freudian to deny that there are mammarian overtones in all those round lights with nipple-like protruberances in the centers.

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When the world economy worsened in the 1970's, so did Panton's career; it did not revive until the 90's, when retroactive interest in 60's design and culture surged.
Much has happened since the debut of the Panton chair in the year of the Summer of Love. ''Laugh-In'' turned into ''A Clockwork Orange.'' We lost our ability to trust in the basic all-rightness of things; the good-enough mother of early 60's consumer culture morphed into the earth mother of the hippies, but then, after years of stress, turned into the anxious and depressed Prozac mother. Many no longer feel safe, and some are turning to fundamentalist cults of the father for reassurance. That makes the generous, futuristic optimism of Panton's world all the more wonderful to revisit.

{images via Apartment Therapy}

~exp~