F300 Lounge Chair

Industrial plastic waste is not the material most people expect to find under an icon of 1960s French design. It is what the F300 is made of now.

Gubi has put Pierre Paulin's 1965 F300 Lounge Chair back into production, remaking its one-piece, hammock-like form in HiREK, an engineered polymer produced from industrial plastic waste. Nothing like the F300 existed in the late 1960s: sculptural, futuristic, a chair typology with no precedent, which meant reviving it was less a matter of dusting off old drawings than working out how such a shape could be built at all. Every chair begins as HiREK pellets injected into a multi-station moulding machine, with one station each for the seat, the front leg and the back leg. The moulds vary wall thickness through every piece, running thicker at the stress points and thinner everywhere the chair can afford to be light. Then the hand work starts. Craftspeople trim the excess, smooth the edges with ceramic tools, and leave each component to rest for 24 hours so the thermoplastic stabilises and holds its shape.

Upholstery goes on by thermoforming, the method used in luxury car interiors: foam is precision-cut, fixed to a moulded insert, wrapped in fabric and stapled down. Nine coverings are offered, from Dedar's Alpaca Alto to Gubi's own smooth leathers, and bases come in Alabaster White, Pastel Green and Molé. Custom jigs align the legs, which take metal inserts and polyethylene gliders before the chair leaves the line.

Paulin's aim, in Gubi's words, was a hammock-like structure that feels fluid and free. That the version now made to order in Italy reaches it through recycled polymer and a day of resting time per component is the sort of detail the finished chair gives no hint of, which is rather the point. Armrests are optional.