Eventually Sunday’s Grammy Awards (1 February 2026), Unhealthy Bunny took dwelling Album of the 12 months for Debí Tirar Más Fotos, launched in January 2025. The album was additionally nominated for the first-ever Greatest Album Cowl award, although that prize finally went to Tyler, The Creator’s Chromakopia. For the design fans at Wallpaper*, nonetheless, the Puerto Rican rapper’s album artwork holds particular significance.
The picture is deceptively easy: two white plastic chairs on a grassy garden. They’re the acquainted stackable plastic form you’ve seen a thousand occasions earlier than – in gardens, on the road, in colleges or different public buildings. These are ‘monobloc’ chairs – so named as a result of they’re molded from a single, steady block of plastic – and they’re arguably probably the most ubiquitous design object on the planet.
(Picture credit score: Rimas Music)
Within the arms of Unhealthy Bunny and Eric Rojas, the photographer behind the album cowl, the monobloc chair turns into greater than furnishings: it’s cultural shorthand, laden with reminiscence and emotion. In Puerto Rico, these chairs are in all places, drawn into circles by household, buddies and neighbours to speak, snigger and share tales – turning into a logo of neighborhood and id. That is strengthened by the album’s again cowl dedication – ‘to all Puerto Ricans all over the world’.
Learn alongside the album’s title, which interprets to ‘I ought to have taken extra pictures’, the chairs tackle a poignant register. They’re empty, maybe standing in for these now not there: elders who’ve died, relations who’ve emigrated, a lifestyle slowly disappearing. All of this that means is carried, improbably, by two plastic chairs. Herein lies the quilt’s genius.
(Picture credit score: Getty Photographs/3quarks)
That stated, what makes the monobloc so compelling is that it’s each culturally particular and broadly nonspecific. Broadly thought to be probably the most generally used piece of furnishings globally – present in cafes, markets, backyards, colleges and festivals from Sweden to Sudan – it’s the final ‘everychair’.
Throughout a chat in London accompanying the Museum of Fashionable Artwork’s 2025 exhibition Pirouette: Turningpoints in Design, design critic Alice Rawsthorn argued that ‘few objects are as actually quotidian because the monobloc, which conforms to the dictionary definition of the phrase by being unalloyedly ‘peculiar’, ‘commonplace’ and ‘on a regular basis’’.
Its success is rooted in its simplicity. The monobloc is produced in a single step, from a single materials, sometimes polypropylene. It’s light-weight, sturdy, weather-resistant, stackable and very low-cost to fabricate. In a video accompanying Pirouette, head of structure and design at MoMA, Paola Antonelli, describes the monobloc as ‘the end result of an extended standing need amongst designers to create the right industrially manufactured chair’.
Previous to the mid-twentieth century, the concept of a chair with no screws of meeting required was just about inconceivable. Advances in thermoplastics within the late-Nineteen Fifties made it doable to warmth plastic pellets, liquefy them and inject them right into a mildew to provide a single, seamless type. Within the Nineteen Sixties, Danish designer Verner Panton, together with Italian designers Joe Colombo and Vico Magistretti and German architect Helmut Bätzner, developed the idea. The monobloc chair solely entered true mass manufacturing, nonetheless, after 1972, when French engineer Henry Massonnet launched the Fauteuil 300 by way of his firm Stamp. His mannequin decreased manufacturing time to underneath two minutes.
To Rawsthorne’s thoughts, the design leap occasioned by the monobloc echoes that of one of many earliest mass-manufactured chairs: the No. 14, developed within the mid-1800s by German cabinetmaker Michael Thonet – ‘the primary chair designed to promote for a similar value as an affordable bottle of wine, making it the primary chair to seat modestly paid academics in addition to aristocrats’.
Verner Panton’s monobloc Panton Chair (1959)
(Picture credit score: Vitra)
Crucially, Massonnet by no means patented the Fauteuil 300. In consequence, it was freely copied by producers all over the world, incrementally modified time and again. By the early Nineteen Eighties, polypropylene injection molding had been broadly mastered, resulting in billions of monobloc chairs offered over the next many years.
The monobloc is one thing of an industrial design holy grail, representing the purest expression of its ambition: a whole object, made in a single course of from a single materials, and accessible to nearly everybody in consequence. However for some, that ubiquity has grow to be an issue. Its critics condemn it as a logo of throwaway tradition, environmental hurt and low-cost consumerism. So frequent as to really feel nameless, the monobloc usually appears disposable – an object with a brief life and an extended afterlife in landfill. From 2008 to 2017, authorities in Basel, Switzerland, even banned monobloc plastic chairs from public areas, arguing that they detracted from the town’s look.
‘Not all turning factors in design are wholly optimistic, because the monobloc illustrates by being a pressure for good in some respects and for dangerous in others. The Monobloc’s risks… stem from what was as soon as its principal asset: that it’s made out of plastic,’ Rawsthorne acknowledged, including that it’s nearly not possible to restore the chair when the plastic breaks, making it a poor candidate for round financial system practices.
‘[This] places it on the lengthening listing of improvements which had been broadly thought of to achieve success for a lot of the final century due to their purposeful advantages and technical sophistication, solely to be condemned as ecological nightmares on this one,’ she continued. ‘What the monobloc – and each different once-celebrated design venture dealing with the identical dilemma – wants, is a radically redesigned successor.’
Whether or not you see the monobloc as a design icon or ‘ecological nightmare’ and eyesore, few objects have been extra referenced and repurposed throughout artwork, vogue, movie, memes and political protest, or come to symbolize a lot – from globalisation and modernity to ordinariness and resistance. On the quilt of Debí Tirar Más Fotos, the monobloc is rooted in Puerto Rican life, however it’s a common visible cue. Not dangerous for a chair.
Supply: Wallpaper
