But, is it a classic?

What makes a classic, in terms of furniture? Experts’ opinions can clearly be categorised as seeds and oaks. Seeds symbolise design that may not survive in their original form, but are important because they inspire other creations. Oaks, on the other hand, refer to design that will last for many years. Where does that leave the Louis Ghost chair,  asks Julie Lasky

Designed by Philippe Starck in 2002, the Louis Ghost chair pays homage to French baroque style. The chair has an oval back and twisted angular arms – fancy stuff for a piece of transparent plastic furniture.

But is it a classic? That’s the claim of its producer, Kartell, which recently announced that 1.5 million Louis Ghosts have been sold since the chair’s introduction in October 2002, making it “the most widely sold design chair in the world.”

When I first received the news of Louis Ghost’s impending 10th anniversary, I was sceptical that a chair could be canonised after only a decade. As far as I could see, it performed no greater miracle than being produced as a single molded injection of molten plastic.

Then I reconsidered. Of all the furniture produced in any given decade, only a few pieces qualify as what we think of as icons of that period, and they’re not always easy to predict. Might Louis Ghost be one of those objects of which a future connoisseur would say, “That is so millennial”?

For a better perspective, I asked a dozen contemporary furniture experts for their opinions on which objects produced in the last decade or so would occupy the design-conscious home of 2050, just as, say, the Eames lounge chair, a mid-20th-century creation, resides in ours. The result is a showroom’s worth of potential design classics, against which I offer my own list of five.

But first, what makes a classic? That question neatly divided the experts’ picks into two categories: oaks and seeds. The metaphor came from Emilio Ambasz, the celebrated architect and industrial designer. Midcentury notables like the Eames lounge, Ambasz said, “are like big, strong oaks in the forest. They will last for many years, probably with many little descendants.”

However, Ambasz went on, “Since 2000, I’ve only seen things that are more like seeds,” that is, design that may not survive in its original guise, but is important because it gives rise to other creations. “The iPhone is a seed of more that’s to come,” he said.
Even Murray Moss, the contemporary-design retailer, who is the last person one would imagine championing technology over physical objects, offered the 2007 iPhone as his first choice of a future classic, “because the era is defined by a new means of communication.”

He predicted that “at least the next half a century will continue to explore how we communicate.”

Honeycomb vase

Another seed Moss proposed was Tomas Libertiny’s 2007 honeycomb vase, produced with the assistance of a swarm of bees. He called the vase “a profound, quiet, esoteric kind of object, which was presented as a technology that was right under our nose.”

Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the department of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, has long been smitten with technology. She proposed the 2001 iPod, clarifying that she was lumping it with the iPhone and iPad, but giving it special mention for coming out first.

In the same vein, she mentioned Honey-Pop, Tokujin Yoshioka’s 2000 chair made from sheets of recycled paper that unfold like a Chinese lantern. She also suggested Algues, the 2004 room partition by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for Vitra, which users assemble from green plastic pieces to create what looks like a wall of seaweed.

After the iPhone, the most popular seedling the experts cited was Patrick Jouin’s furniture made with 3-D printing technology – the C1 and C2 chairs in Jouin’s Solid collection for the MGX by Materialise collection (2004), for instance – which demonstrated the possibility of manufacturing objects on demand anywhere in the world.

Similarly, Moss called Jouin’s parasol-like One Shot Stool for Materialise (2006) a “game changer.”

The stool emerges from its manufacturing process fully jointed and ready to unfold, though it hasn’t been touched by a human hand. “It’s the first object made ever to be born fully articulated with no assembly required,” Moss said. The chance that any of these pieces will actually make an appearance in the living room of the future, though, is slight.

The oaks

I had asked for objects that were not just emblematic of their time, but also held the promise of remaining visible and prominent several decades from now. In other words, oaks. The entry with the most votes in this category was Chair One by Konstantin Grcic for Magis (2004). “This strangely skeletal, fractal chair embodies the digital age that engendered it, while also obliquely recalling the classic furniture of Harry Bertoia,” the British design curator and writer Gareth Williams wrote in an email.

Leading the list of Charlotte and Peter Fiell, authors of several books on groundbreaking furniture were Tom Dixon’s Beat lights (2006), a collection of hand-beaten metal pendant lamps with a black finish. The Fiells also proposed Ross Lovegrove’s Supernatural chair for Moroso (2005), a lightweight plastic piece whose oval back is pierced with cheeseholes.

The designer Vicente Wolf proposed a 1970s Cedric Hartman marble-top table and a 1940s swing-arm wall lamp for Hinson. Wolf also suggested Jeffrey Bernett’s 2003 Metropolitan chair for B&B Italia.

In general, chairs dominated the nominations. “Of any object, chairs are the most representative of a time period because they’re also about structure,” said Cara McCarty, curatorial director at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

Of all the chairs that McCarty has encountered in the last dozen years, the one that made the biggest impression was Jouin’s 3-D printed C2, but she hesitated to declare it a classic.

What about the Louis Ghost?

As for the Louis Ghost, is it a classic or a flash in the pan? The experts were divided. Williams, the British design curator, suggested that the chair’s “chameleon-like character” gave it longevity. It “seems to fit it into very many kinds of interior,” he said, “from commercial to domestic, cutting edge to conservative, high-end to economical.”

R Craig Miller, curator of design arts at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, also saw a glorious future for the chair. Antonelli, on the other hand, insisted that the chair was a product of the style-conscious '90s, “no matter when it was designed.”

Top picks

* Until Dawn curtain by Tord Boontje (2004): The curtain is made of Tyvek, the material used in Express Mail envelopes. To date, 50,000 units of the $124-curtain have been sold, said a representative of Artecnica, the manufacturer. Boontje’s equally poetic Garland (2002), a ribbon of metal flowers that wraps around a naked light bulb, has been 10 times as successful.
* Joyn Furniture System by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec (2002): Joyn, by the Bouroullec brothers for Vitra, represents a revolution in office furniture. The cubicle is replaced by an open sawhorse-style table; white stands in for brown.
* Myto Chair by Konstantin Grcic (2008): This evolved from the designer’s experiments with a new kind of plastic that permitted a wide range of thicks and thins and a grid of perforations in the seat and back.
* Antibodi chaise longue by Patricia Urquiola (2006): Urquiola’s productive relationship with the Italian company Moroso has resulted in many notable designs, including this lounge chair with its integration of form and fabric and distinctively fractured millennial silhouette. The floral motif is a signifier of the decade’s infatuation with nature.
* C2 chair by Patrick Jouin (2004): At $38,000, the C2 chair is outrageously expensive, and it’s produced in a brittle prototyping material. By 2050 anyone will be able to print this chair out of plastic, metal or simulated wood or stone.
The form will be millennial, but the chair will be affordable.