The Monobloc is the world’s most common chair. The cheap white plastic stacking chair found everywhere on Earth.

Roughly a billion of them exist, at weddings, roadside cafés, schoolyards and refugee camps on every continent. This is the history of the Monobloc plastic chair: how a rejected 1946 Canadian patent, a Nobel Prize-winning discovery in Italian polymer chemistry, and a French engineer who never protected his design combined to produce an object nobody owns and everybody has sat in.

The story runs from the Structures Laboratory of the National Research Council of Canada, where architects Douglas Simpson and Arthur James Donahue built the first one-piece moulded plastic chair prototype in 1946, through Giulio Natta and Karl Ziegler’s discovery of isotactic polypropylene in Milan in 1954, the great single-form chair experiments of the 1960s, Verner Panton, Vico Magistretti, Joe Colombo and Helmut Bätzner’s Bofinger Chair, and on to Henry Massonnet’s Fauteuil 300 of 1972, the chair that made the Monobloc cheap, and which he never patented.

Ethan Zuckerman’s case that the Monobloc is a « context-free object. » The 1.1 million sold in India in a single year. Free Wheelchair Mission’s use of it as a wheelchair seat. The nine years Basel, Switzerland banned it from the street for being ugly. Alice Rawsthorn’s argument that it is an ecological failure in need of a redesigned successor. The Museum of Modern Art, which bought one and catalogued it under the words « Unidentified Designer. »

Whether you call it the Monobloc, the monoblock chair, the white plastic chair, the resin garden chair or just the cheap plastic chair, it is arguably the most successful piece of industrial design ever made, and the least credited.

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