Designwire Daily: from the editors of Interior Design magazine

Kartell Marks a Decade of Polycarbonate Innovation

by Nicholas Tamarin | Friday, August 27, 2010

Ghost Buster

When Italian manufacturer Kartell introduced Philippe Starck’s La Marie chair at the all-important Milan furniture fair a decade ago, it marked the first time a chair made out of polycarbonate went into production. It was a prescient move as the material, shunned by furniture designers until the 1990’s because it was more expensive than polypropylene and was problematic to use in injection molding, turned out to be the wave of the future, celebrated this year by the company with the introduction of Starck’s Ghost Buster, an innovative piece of transparent polycarbonate design ten years in the making.

In between, the company released Starck’s iconic Louis Ghost chair in 2001, perhaps the most famous design not only to use transparent polycarbonate but also of Starck’s career and the 2000’s. With over a million sold, it is the “most widely sold design chair in the world,” according to the company.

Louie and Lou Lou Ghost Chairs

2008 brought another Starck collaboration, the Mr. Impossible chair, which grew out of what was then the seemingly impossible idea that two oval polycarbonate shells could be welded by laser rather than glued together. The result was a chair that appeared to be suspended in air.

The culmination of all this innovation is this year’s Ghost Buster. Another result of the hugely successful Kartell-Starck alliance, the unit is made from a single mould of polycarbonate and weighs 35 pounds, unheard of for an object of its size. It is, as Starck puts it, “an evocative image, a ghost of those commodes that perhaps existed but which I never ran across.”

Mr. Impossible Chair; La Marie Chair

Images courtesy of Kartell.