Around Home : The Plia Chair
IT FOLDS AND STACKS--rarely does one chair do both. The affordable Plia chair (named after the Italian word for fold ), designed in 1968 by Bologna, Italy-based Giancarlo Piretti and made by Castelli (now owned by Krueger International) is probably the best-selling “art” chair of all time: more than 6 million Plias have been sold in its two-decade existence. About 70,000 Plias still sell annually. Interviewed during West Week at the Pacific Design Center last February, Piretti recalled the design process that gave birth to the Plia: “If you look at a conventional folding chair in profile, you’ll see that it has three joints. I found a way of shrinking the triangular mechanism to a single joint, which looked so elegant and beautiful I wanted to make it fully visible. That, in turn, led to the transparent seat.”
Castelli had trouble ironing out one bug in the chair, however: After years of steady use, the early-vintage Plia chairs I owned one by one cracked, invariably at a dinner party, under a guest who was just then lifting a glass of red wine. In fairness, Piretti points out that the Plia was intended as an occasional chair, not to be used as an everyday dining chair.
Notwithstanding the chair’s engineering ingenuity, what accounts for the Plia’s astonishing appeal is its transparency, which automatically makes it the perfect choice for a cramped apartment, or the chair to place over a beloved Persian rug when you can’t bear to cover up the pattern. But that transparency worried people at first, Piretti said, mimicking a timid expression and gingerly settling his weight into the seat. “Other customers never could adjust to the transparent seat, so for them we came out with a smoke-colored version.”
The Plia chair is available at Bullock’s and through Krueger International, Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles; telephone (213) 659-2133. Available in a chrome or paint frame with seat and back of red, green, white or black plastic ($118 to $143 retail), clear or smoke transparent plastic ($128) or cane ($274).
