Chair, Corrugated Cardboard Chair,

1969

In 1969, Willy Guhl’s interior design class at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich organized a student competition to make cardboard furniture for the café and cinema at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Zürich during the Magie des Papiers (Magic of Paper) exhibition. Unlike the other entrants, Alois Rasser did not try to stabilize the material by folding it, but instead drew inspiration from the rolls of corrugated cardboard delivered. He produced comfortable stools with seat pans by striking the inner section of the cylindrical cardboard roll on one side to press it down, then cutting off the material that had been pushed outward on the other side. Rasser applied the same principle to find the optimal cut for armchairs. Using a band saw to cut a corrugated cardboard roll in half along a shallow S-curve, he was able to create two armchairs at once. The final touch involved shaping the seat pans manually and removing the resulting protrusion on the lower side. (Renate Menzi)