The Panton Chair Has No Legs and No Seams

In August 1967 a chair with no legs went on public view for the first time. It was a single S-shaped sweep of plastic, the seat flowing into a base that curled forward along the floor, and it held a person up by cantilever alone. Verner Panton had been sketching it for about a decade. Finding someone willing to make it took most of that time.

Out of Jacobsen's Office

Panton was born on February 13, 1926, in Gamtofte, Denmark. He studied architecture at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen from 1947 to 1951 and spent 1950 to 1952 in Arne Jacobsen's office, working mainly on furniture, including the development of the Ant chair. That studio would later produce the Egg chair. Panton opened his own practice in 1955.

Danish modern at the time meant teak and careful joinery. Panton went the other way. He liked saturated color in synthetic materials, and rooms where the furniture and the walls were the same idea. Copenhagen still wears the teak version of the national style proudly, as our Copenhagen design guide shows, and Panton spent much of his career working outside Denmark.

Ten Years of Sketches

The chair goes back to the mid-1950s. According to the official Verner Panton archive, he was already experimenting with a single-material cantilever chair for a WK-Möbel competition in 1956, and sketches from around 1957 clearly point to the final shape. The cantilever itself was old news. Mart Stam and Marcel Breuer were bending steel tube into cantilevered chairs in the late 1920s, and Breuer's earlier Wassily chair had already turned a frame into a drawing. Doing it in one molded piece, with no frame at all, was the new part.

Panton then had a full-scale model made in polystyrene. You could not sit on it. Its job was to win over manufacturers. That model now belongs to the Vitra Design Museum, and the Panton estate points out that it is often wrongly described as a prototype.

The breakthrough came in the early 1960s from Willi Fehlbaum, then managing director of Vitra. Fehlbaum agreed to develop the chair for series production, and Panton moved his family to Basel. Development ran hard from 1965 to 1967. The Danish design magazine Mobilia presented the result that year, and the official archive dates the first public showing to August 1967.

Five Materials, One Shape

The outline has barely moved since then. What the chair is made of has changed repeatedly, and that is how collectors date one.

The first series, from 1967 to 1968, was cold-molded polyester resin reinforced with fiberglass and then painted. Herman Miller sold the chair once Vitra began series production. From 1968 to 1971 the second series was made of painted rigid polyurethane foam.

In 1971 came the version that was supposed to democratize it. The third series used Luran S, a colored thermoplastic polystyrene that needed no paint, and you can identify it by ridges under the bend where the seat meets the base. The cheaper plastic did not age well. Production stopped in 1979, according to the Wikipedia history of the Panton Chair, because the chairs were not durable enough and looked worn over time.

For four years there was no Panton Chair at all. In 1983 it returned in painted rigid polyurethane foam, with Panton's signature on the base, and that foam version is still sold today as the Panton Chair Classic. In 1999 Vitra launched a series in colored polypropylene, and that version is still in production. A scaled-down Panton Junior for children followed in 2005.

The Panton Look

The chair is hard to separate from the rooms Panton built around it. In 1968 Bayer hired him to design its showroom on a Rhine excursion steamer at the Cologne furniture fair, the project that became Visiona, and he came back for Visiona 2 in 1970. In 1969 he did the interiors for the Spiegel publishing house in Hamburg, down to the canteen, which survives largely as he left it. Wall-to-wall orange, red and purple, with circles everywhere. The chair was the portable piece of a whole environment.

The magazines caught on early. In 1970 the British title Nova used it in a photo sequence called How to Undress in Front of Your Husband. In January 1995 Nick Knight photographed a nude Kate Moss on a Panton Chair for the cover of British Vogue. It sits in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Design Museum in London, and in 2006 Denmark added it to its official Culture Canon.

What keeps it from reading as a period piece is that plastic furniture never really caught up. Molded chairs are now cheap and everywhere, but almost none of them commit to a single gesture the way this one does. It works alone in a white room as sculpture and in a set around a dining table, and it slots into the same rooms as the Eames Lounge Chair without looking like a different century. It also explains a lot about where Memphis got the nerve to treat color as structure. For more furniture from the period, see our mid-century modern hub and the rest of our design coverage.

If you find a vintage one, turn it over. Ridges below the bend mean Luran S, made in the 1970s. A signature on the base means the foam version made from 1983 on.