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World Design Spotlight: ECO chair, by Carlos Tiscar
Towards the end of 2011, the firm Capdell was seeking a chair with a very pronounced and differentiating personality.
The firm’s artistic director, Salvador Villalba, drafted some preliminary guidelines which detailed that the design should be for a beech wood chair, plain but not simple, very comfortable, without arms and with the backrest supported by bars at the rear.
With these indications in mind, the designer Carlos Tiscar set to work to create ECO, which he defines as “an appealing chair with contemporary virtues”
It is a simple, wooden chair, a kind of missing link in the continuity of the search for seating solutions that began at the end of the Second World War.
“I designed the Eco chair based on the client’s brief, which indicated that it was commercially appropriate to retrieve a type of chair belonging to the nineteen-fifties and which several important companies had developed in their catalogues, logically adapted to our times, designed by Pearson Lloyd or Naoto Fukasawa, to quote a few references,” explains Tiscar.
“While working on my design, after having researched dozens of models of the most notable chairs by the designers and architects of that era, I reached the conclusion that, in the end, nearly all of them were still viable as functional chairs, even nowadays.”
“Therefore, how could I recreate a chair from those years in the present day, from the point of view of design? The answer came to me the day before Christmas, and the fact is I knew it was right.”
“My proposal was to do basically the same but with an important improvement compared to those chairs used as a reference: stackability. Thanks to the shape of its structure and seat, the ECO chair is a stackable chair, although this is not apparent from its physiognomy. With this improvement the chair, without losing its characteristic reference to past times, is adapted to the needs of the contract market in which it is offered, setting it apart from contemporary English, Italian and German competitors,” explains the designer.
It is a simple, wooden chair, a kind of missing link in the continuity of the search for seating solutions that began at the end of the Second World War. With the language of manual processes along the lines of what is known as Teak Style produced by Danish manufactures of the nineteen forties and fifties.
Thanks to the shape of its structure and seat, the ECO chair is a stackable chair, although this is not apparent from its physiognomy. With this improvement the chair, without losing its characteristic reference to past times, is adapted to the needs of the contract market in which it is offered.
Its structure also features an element that is unknown in wooden chairs of any era: the bar that stabilizes the back legs, underneath the backrest, which also functions as a distinguishing feature of the model, forming a kind of H that gives the chair its graphic character when seen from behind.
“One thing I learned, coincidentally, with this project is that, thanks to the triangular form of its structure, the Eco chair weighs less than is usual, since the front and back stretchers are shorter,” points out Tiscar.
“Perhaps what is most noteworthy is that I learned from the work done in the past by so many people who dealt with the same problem in their day,” explains the designer. “It is a method I have followed for many years and which gives good results, always without falling into the trap of merely imitating, of course. In the case of the ECO chair this was especially appropriate,” he concludes.
