He asked Pirkko to dress all black and sit in the chair and drink Coca-Cola with a straw. He emptied their whole bedroom, bought a huge white board, and placed the Ball Chair in the center of it.
He painted the whole shell of the Ball Chair red and enlarged and glued the Coca-Cola logo to the back. In 1964 he had a great idea for marketing the Coca-Cola brand. The business representative came to see the chair but, in the end, they were not interested.Įero Aarnio didn’t lose his drive to success that easily. The Ball Chair was delivered to the Helsinki, where it stood on the shop floor in Kasarmitori. Eero showed them the drawings at the factory and told about the prototype he had made. The first potential customer for the Ball Chair was a furniture shop Sopenkorpi in Lahti.
Completed in their home stood the first prototype of the Ball Chair, the very same one still present in the Aarnio family’s current home in Veikkola. The shell became as hard as stone, and it was ready to be upholstered by a talented upholsterer Kataja in Haaga.
Egg chair autocad block install#
Right behind the opening of the shell, he could install a round pipe ring, and laminate it with fiberglass. Facing the problem, a lightbulb came on over his head. The shell did in fact get stronger, but Eero realized that the weight and costs would also rise accordingly. First, they thought of adding more fiberglass layers. Taking of the molds for the first time, the outer surface turned out beautifully, but the inside was uneven and rugged. Pirkko’s father was a school teacher in Salo, where Eero spent evenings and weekends with Pirkko’s brother in the crafts class room developing the first ever shell to the Ball Chair. Eero immediately knew that it would have to be prototyped first. Looking at the original sketch of the Ball Chair, it was created on the 11th of January in 1963. He said to his wife: “I will make a chair that when it is put in a shop window, no one will just walk past it.” He had always loved to provoke, to cause a stir.
Even though functionality was always his first aim, Eero Aarnio is no ordinary designer. The Aarnios also needed a chair that would be large enough for all four of the family, him and his wife Pirkko, and their two daughters, to sit in together at home. He had found the most practical form for the new material he was working with. A closed ball could endure almost anything. Could he design furniture out of fiberglass?Įero knew that the best form for malleable plastic is curve. He wondered if one could exploit this material outside of the boat industry. He had always been fascinated by sailing boats and had familiarized himself with the new material, fiberglass. After starting his career as a freelancer in the beginning of the 1960s, Eero Aarnio was still an unknown designer dreaming of creating a furniture piece that people would remember.
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