Quote from Eero Aarnio
"The idea of the chair was very obvious. We had moved to
our first home and I had started my free-lance career in 1962.
We had a home but no proper big chair, so I decided to make one,
but some way a really new one. After some drawing I noticed that
the shape of the chair had become so simple that it was merely
a ball. I pinned the full scale drawing on the wall and ‚sat'
in the chair to see how my head would move when sitting inside
it. Being the taller one of us I ‚sat' in the chair and my
wife drew the course of my head on the wall. This is how I determined
the height of the chair. Since I aimed at a ball shape, the other
lines were easy to draw, just remembering that the chair would
have to fit through a doorway. After this I made the first prototype
myself using an inside mould, which has been made using the same
principle as a glider fuselage or wing. I covered the plywood
body mould with wet paper and laminated the surface with fiberglass,
rubbed down the outside, removed the mould from inside, had it
upholstered and added the leg. In the end I installed the red
telephone on the inside wall of the chair. The naming part of
the chair was easy, the BALL CHAIR was born."
|