Along with his former creative partner Bill Stumpf, Don Chadwick designed the world’s most ubiquitous office chair: the Aeron. In a career spanning six decades, the meticulous Los Angeles–based industrial designer has worked tirelessly to devise fewer than a dozen commercial objects. In the 1970s and ’80s, Chadwick’s work ran against the current of his contemporaries Frank Gehry and Richard Meier, privileging industrial production and functional performance over craft processes and historical reference. Working with Stumpf’s ergonomic innovations, Chadwick’s designs celebrated their own technology, leaving bare a chair’s mechanisms—and in doing so helped to define the aesthetic of the internet era.
I first interviewed Chadwick more than a decade ago during the making of my book, A Taxonomy of Office Chairs, and what struck me most about him was his work’s relationship to its surroundings. As he explained, Los Angeles had everything an industrial designer needed: a technological air, an abundance of state-of-the-art prop factories, and a generally optimistic attitude unfettered by conservative traditions. His early designs drew from Vietnam-era war technologies, his mid-career was inspired by photographs he took at his friends’ automotive shops, and his more recent work addresses the pervasively Californian theme of wellness. Although he much prefers discussing the future, Chadwick sat down to discuss five of his past achievements in chairs.
“This was one of the first roto-molded chairs in America, and I sold it as a prototype to Knoll at the beginning of my career. I had been turned on to a company that was manufacturing large plastic containers, which I later found out were designed to hold Napalm bombs. Even though this was in the middle of the Vietnam War, my interest was less of a political gesture than me wondering, ‘What would it look like for a piece of furniture to be made with this process?’ Something important to consider about the design history of California is that a lot of the processes developed by the area’s aerospace and military industries have made their way into commercial product. This chair was an experiment in exploring technology, which has always been a strong part of how I approach design.”