Hatje Cantz

Monobloc - Hauke Wendler

A visual history of the world's most famous and ubiquitous chair The Monobloc is the bestselling piece of furniture of all time: an estimated one billion copies of this white plastic chair are in circulation all over the world. This book arises from a documentary by German film director Hauke Wendler, who spent eight years filming on five continents to explore the impact of the Monobloc on a global scale. Combining archival documentation with images from Wendler’s film (to be released in 2022), this book complicates the narrative and mystery of the Monobloc's popularity. Embracing its ubiquity, it also addresses the chair’s environmental, economic and aesthetic impacts. How does the Monobloc threaten our environment and good taste? Finally, how has it become indispensable to millions of people for whom a chair is a chair and nothing more? This book offers insight, through film, photography and design history, into the story of how an unremarkable, stackable chair conquered the world.

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