Free Plastic by Susan Freinkel Page A

been one of Kartell's most popular pieces, selling many hundreds of thousands. This despite the fact that it costs four hundred dollars—which is not much for a traditional armchair but still quite a ways up the food chain from the unpedigreed monobloc. Somehow, the Louis Ghost has avoided both the pitfall of the avant-garde that kept the Panton chair from succeeding in the commercial marketplace and the stigma of cheapness that still bedevils the monobloc. I suspect the Louis Ghost has been so successful because it hits that sweet spot between cool and comfortable. Raymond Loewy, the grandee of twentieth-century industrial design, called it the MAYA principle—the most advanced yet most acceptable. The Louis Ghost takes full advantage of what plastic has to offer artistically without radically revising what we expect in a chair. The chair works because Starck accepted plastic on its own terms and plumbed its shiny, shallow waters for a genuine synthetic aesthetic.
    I was curious to see how a monobloc chair would stack up against the Louis Ghost. So that afternoon I brought along one I had purchased at Home Depot, a model dubbed the Backgammon for no apparent reason. To my relief, the store manager was unfazed when I walked in with my Backgammon in tow. "Of course," he murmured smoothly when I explained I wanted to compare the two, as if it were an everyday request.
    I took a couple of turns sitting in one and then the other. I can't say the Louis Ghost was much more comfortable than my chair from Home Depot. It was roomier than the Backgammon and provided more back support. But it was also so slippery that it was hard to comfortably settle in. The Backgammon dipped slightly when I plunked down in it. In truth, neither was a seat I'd want to spend a whole lot of time in. (Though I am sure the Louis Ghost would hold up better over time than my Backgammon. Not long after my visit to Kartell, my son leaned back in it too hard, and the spokes cracked.)
    "It could be said, that when we design a chair, we make a society and city in miniature," the British architect Peter Smithson wrote.I look closely at the Louis Ghost and my Backgammon, trying to imagine the societies they evoke. One conjures a world of dazzling possibilities, the other a realm of cheap utility.
    Looking at the two chairs together, I see a fair representation of the partner we've found in plastic: a Janus-faced companion who can rightly inspire both our deepest admiration and our strongest disgust.
    I was outside the store on another day when a man and a woman came walking by arm in arm. They stopped for a moment to peer through the window.
    "Look," the man said in a tone of utter incredulity, "it's
plastic
furniture."
    "Yes," his companion answered, "but the designs are
gorgeous.
"

3. Flitting Through Plasticville
    W HEN MY OLDER SON was born, a well-meaning friend—who had no children of her own—gave him a beautiful cherrywood rattle. It was smooth to the touch, safe to mouth, made a lovely plinking sound when shaken—and my son wanted nothing to do with it. He wanted the gaily colored set of plastic keys and, later, the squeaky vinyl bath book and, still later, the bright orange car with big blue wheels that made clicking sounds when it was pushed along the floor. Plastic is the medium of play today, so like most families with young children, we soon filled our house with enough junk to stock the midway at a state fair. We were forever tripping over remote-controlled cars, pulling plastic soldiers from between couch cushions, and cursing Lego when we stepped barefoot on the sharp-edged blocks in the middle of the night. My two sons accumulated an arsenal of plastic guns and Jedi swords. My daughter gathered a nursery of plastic baby dolls. (So much for our efforts to fight gender stereotyping.) For birthday parties, I stocked the goody bags with items from the catalog of the Oriental Trading Company, specialists in cheap plastic doodads: