It’s what the 2060s looked like in the 1960s.
Ever since the Ball Chair (sometimes called the Globe Chair) was first created in 1963 by Finnish designer Eero Aarnio, it’s been a standard set-design to indicate “high-tech” or “the future.”. It’s been used in such iconic works as The Prisoner television show and the 1996 Tim Burton film Mars Attacks!
Somehow, the spherical shape suggests a futuristic quality that can’t be matched by more conventional, angular furnishings. But according to Aarnio, he actually designed the chair for his own home:
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.
Of course, anyone who knows the truth about this spherical, hollowed-out chair understands that it exists primarily as a backdrop for photographing models. Someone figured out long ago that a beautiful model sitting in a Ball Chair is a thing of future-mod perfection. Somehow, it just always seems to work. Here are a few examples of that retro-futurist perfection captured by the lens:
More after the jump…