Dezeen Magazine

Plastic Classic by Pili Wu

Industrial design student Pili Wu of Taiwan has combined a traditional chair back with an anonymous plastic stool.

Called Plastic Classic, the product combines imagery from traditional, expensive Chinese furniture with the cheap stools, ubiquitous in Taiwan.

Here's some text from Pili Wu:

--

The Plastic Classic project began as a focus on the transformation of Taiwanese culture, hoping to represent what I thought and felt of living in Taiwan.

In Taiwan, plastic stools are very popular, seen on streets, alleys, and by street food stalls or ban dou (traditional Taiwanese outdoor banquet, seen at weddings or celebrations). Taiwan used to be a plastic production kingdom, plastic chairs and stools have been present for a very long time, yet interestingly nobody knows about the designer or inventor of plastic stools, but it’s cheap price, simple structure and fast production has enabled its popularity, so popular that it has turned into a “classic” design that nobody has every really noticed. Similarly, loop chair is another classic of traditional Chinese furniture, its elegant and reliable structure represents a certain social status and position.

The naming of this project–Plastic Classic, is aiming to redefine the design of such unknown “classical” cheap plastic stool; combining mass-produced cheap stool with a contradicting traditional loop chair of elegant structure and expensive imagery, hence creating a new classic; a strong contrast is made due to differing history and background, as well as the cheap and expensive expression that people already had in mind, Plastic Classic is a chair that has two personalities in one body.