smow blog Design Calendar: May 25th 1915 – Happy Birthday Robin Day!

“Rare is the human backside that hasn’t found solace and support in Mr. Day’s most famous creation”, thus, with just a touch of music hall sauciness, begins Bruce Weber his obituary to the British designer Robin Day in the New York Times from November 20th 2010, before continuing, “a molded polypropylene shell fastened to an enameled bent tubular steel base that has become familiar seating in schools, churches, offices, auditoriums, home patios, kitchens, dens, bedrooms and basements around the world.”¹

Yet however ubiquitous Robin Day’s Poly side chair for Hille is and was, as a designer Robin Day was so much more.

Born in High Wycombe, England, on May 25th 1915 Robin Day initially studied at High Wycombe School of Art before in 1934 a Royal Exhibition Scholarship took him to the London Royal College of Art where he studied furniture and interior design. Excluded from National Service on account of his asthma Robin Day spent the war years teaching at Beckenham School of Art before in 1946 he took up a position at Regent Street Polytechnic in London, in addition to undertaking numerous exhibition design commissions. Robin Day’s breakthrough as furniture designer came in 1948 when together with Clive Latimer, a former colleague from Beckenham, he won first prize in the Storage Units category of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s “International Low-Cost Furniture Competition” with a collection of delightful reduced wood and steel tubing cabinets. Although as part of the prize the units were produced in small series by Roanoke, Virginia based Johnson-Carper Furniture and made available in selected US department stores, they never entered mass production: did however lead to a commission to design chairs for the 1951 “Festival of Britain” and an invitation from London based manufacturer Hille to help them update, refresh and modernise their programme.

Featuring an extensive programme of cultural, scientific and technology exhibitions and events throughout the whole of the United Kingdom, the Festival of Britain was conceived to encourage a feeling of renewal and progression following the depression and deprivations of the war years. In addition to designing and furnishing the Homes and Garden Pavilion Robin Day was also asked to design chairs for the auditorium, orchestra pit and public areas of the new Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank; chairs which in the words of Stephen Bayley “presented rationed, beige Britain with a clean, colourful Scandiwegian option”², chairs which with their innovative use of material and unfamiliar yet accessible forms raised Robin Day to one of the highest profile and highest regarded furniture designer in the UK and chairs which telling remain largely in use today.

At this point it is necessary, and indeed fair, to point out that Robin Day completed the commission for the Homes and Garden Pavilion in cooperation with his wife, the textile designer Lucienne Day. Herself a graduate of the Royal College of Art Lucienne Day’s reputation was, like that of her husbands, largely established at the Festival of Britain where the popular success of her “Calyx” textile created in conjunction with Heals’ of London and her wallpaper designs for Cole & Son and John Line saw her become one of the UK’s most important and influential textile designers. In the course of the 1960s and 70s Lucienne Day increasingly turned to pure art over applied arts; however, Lucienne and Robin Day continued to work closely on many projects including those with carpet manufacturer Woodward Grosvenor, an interior design contract with BOAC Airlines, and perhaps most notably the Day’s 25 year relationship with the department store chain John Lewis in context of which the Day’s worked across a range of corporate identity, interior design and product design commissions that helped define John Lewis as the premium UK department store chain. Thus in many ways, at least superficially, Robin and Lucienne Day can be considered a British pendant to Charles and Ray Eames.

In addition to his celebrated Festival of Britain work 1951 also marked the formal start of Robin Day’s cooperation with Hille. By popular legend, until the late 1940s Hille had largely produced generic furniture based on established forms before in 1949 company director Leslie Julius asked Robin Day to help them establish its own lines of contemporary furniture. The first Robin Day product for Hille was the 1951 Hillestak Chair, a wooden stacking chair whose endearingly reduced and spartan form language owns as much to limited availability of materials in post-War Britain and the need for industrial frugality as it does to any formal intentions on the part of the designer; and was a work which quickly established itself as a popular option for multi-purpose seating in canteens, schools, workplaces, et al, and as such further underpinned Day’s reputation. Despite the success his work enjoyed, and his own popularity and fame, Robin Day remained firmly rooted in the everyday reality of the design profession, convinced in both the social responsibility of the designer and the need to employ new materials and new processes as economically as possible and for the benefit of all. Writing in 1953 Robin Day muses that “In Britain it is primarily in the low cost market that opportunities for the manufacture of progressive furniture occurs. The decorators’ market as it exists in America is almost unknown, and there are comparatively few buyers with a taste for modern design who can afford expensive furniture.” ³ A year later polypropylene was isolated and in 1957 made commercially available; recognising the opportunities offered Robin Day began experimenting with the new material before in 1963 Hille released Day’s injection moulded polypropylene Poly side chair, a work which despite its uncompromising orthogonal form, unnervingly short backrest, curiously askant frame and general lack of the flowing organic curves so en vogue in that period instantly established itself on the global market, thanks no doubt, at least in part to its initial selling price of around 3 pounds, about 55 pounds in today’s terms. In subsequent years Day developed the side chair into a family of polypropylene chairs which have, according to Hille’s own figures, gone on to sell some 50 million units, and, as we say, come to define the life and work of one of the UK’s most influential and important designers.

Happy Birthday Robin Day!

1. Bruce Weber, “Robin Day, Whose Work Is in Waiting Rooms Everywhere, Dies at 95” The New York Times, November 20th 2010

2. Stephen Bayley, “20 million plastic chairs bear witness to vision of the people’s designer; Robin Day’s eureka moment gave furniture a new slant”, The Times, November 20th 2010

3. “Contemporary Furniture Designers: William Armbruster, Edward J. Wormley, Paul McCobb, Charles Eames, Robin Day, and Hans Hoffman”, Everyday Art Quarterly, No. 28, Contemporary Furniture Designers and Their Work (1953)

The Poly side chair by Robin Day for Hille (bottom right), here with its contemporaries from Charles & Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen in the London Design Museum.