Glass chair

Inspired by the futuristic set designs in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Glass Chair is a landmark in twentieth-century furniture design. It builds on the avant-garde planar construction of De Stijl but offers an innovative method of bonding the glass at each join with ultraviolet-hardening adhesive. This breakthrough surely inspired Sottsass a decade later, when he insisted that Murano glassworks Toso Vetri d’Arte break the age-old tradition of hot welding glass by substituting chemical glue. Sottsass surely appreciated the clean precision of the invisible joins in Kuramata’s chair as a way to enhance the visual transparencies and clarity of his own glass forms. Glass Chair is a study in visual lightness contrasted by the object’s actual weight, a play on an almost invisible structure for a barely visible chair.