Hasta La Ideas

“If we succeed in finding solutions that correspond to each material, it will result in completely different design methods and formal characters.”

Those words were written by Willy Guhl, one of Switzerland’s first industrial designers, in 1950. He backed up that philosophy with action. In 1951, he was teaching at the Zurich University of the Arts when he learned of an interesting opportunity: Eternit, a Swiss company whose eponymous product was fiber cement produced in sheets, contacted the school, inviting them to think of applications for their stuff.

Eternit, the product, was a composite sheet of material containing cement and fibers. It could be molded, and it was durable and weatherproof; up until then it had been used to make siding and roofing.

Image: Harald Weber, CC BY-SA 3.0

Guhl saw another possibility. He created a wooden mold with the exact same surface area as a single sheet of Eternit. He then laid the sheet over the mold, and after the cement set up, he had what would be known as the Loop chair.

There was zero waste in Guhl’s production process. Each Loop chair uses a single sheet of Eternit, and Guhl hid the seam skillfully (to this day I have no idea where the seam is, at least on the originals).

Guhl’s use of Eternit could be likened to what the Eameses did with plywood, which was to turn a building material into an elegant piece of furniture.

Eternit, the company, was thrilled; the chair became a hit, and stayed in production for decades.

There was just one problem, which wouldn’t come to light for some time. One of the fibers in Eternit is asbestos; part of what made Eternit popular was its fire-resistance. But asbestos of course causes lung cancer, and as awareness of the material’s harmful nature grew, the Loop chair was discontinued in 1980.

Guhl subsequently redesigned the chair, and in 1997 an asbestos-free variant went into production. The redesigned version has two telltale grooves in the back, allowing any collector to easily tell it apart from the asbestos-containing classic. And the production was a little sloppier; with the modern version, you can clearly see the seam on the front of the chair, which I consider kind of traitorous to the original design.

Health concerns aside, today the original sells for around $8,000 on auction sites.