By Vico Magistretti, Artemide
Located in Cascina, Pisa
A set of two Selene stackable chairs in red resin reinforced with fiberglass, designed by Vico Magistretti in 1967 and produced by Artemide Milano in the 1970s.
The Selene chair was designed in 1967 by Magistretti to be produced in a plastic material, as he affirmed: "The seat and the back are simple curved surfaces. For me, the legs represented the real image of the piece, with as small a volume as that of any common wooden chair. I solved it by exploiting the molding of a plastic material formed by a simple 3-millimeter-thick sheet with a simple but very resistant "S" cross-section which inter-related the object with ordinary chairs without however the elephant legs so untypical of chairs. It was fun working with the model maker on the wood model." When produced in series, "a unit comes out of the machine every five minutes": Selene is the fruit of a single compression molding process on a pre-impregnated sheet (Ottagono 15 / 1969). Magistretti solves the problem of leg resistance by adopting an "S-shaped" configuration that confers resistance to a sheet only 3 millimeters thick. The formal and structural solution had already been previously adopted for the Chimera lamp (a self-supporting methacrylate sheet) and in developing the legs of the Demetrio table...
Category
1970s Italian Mid-Century Modern Vintage Jan Ekselius Chairs