Mullca chair
The Mullca chair was the typical chair that was used in all schools in France until the 1980s.
history
The Mullca was a simple school chair with steel struts, a seat and a curved back made of plywood . It was created in 1947 by Gaston Cavaillon and introduced into French schools by the investor and furniture manufacturer Robert Müller. The name Mullca was formed from these two names.
The peculiarity of the technological innovation was that the Mullca consisted of a few components. The rear strut connected the rear and front chair legs as well as the backrest at the same time. The thin-walled pipe system became unbreakable through brazing and thus remained light. The stress test showed that the stool could withstand a ton. The back was arched and forced the student to sit straight. The seat and back were easy to replace, so the chair was easy to repair. In addition, he did not scratch the walls of the classrooms, as the curvature of the rear legs prevented this. The Mullca chairs were stackable.
The state-owned purchasing company Union des groupements d'achats publics (UGAP) declared the Mullca chair as school furniture in 1950, and since France is a centralized country, the choice of UGAP applied to all of France. The basic shape changed only slightly over the years. There were different color markings on the rear struts, which followed the different six sizes depending on the student's growth. The Mullca chair was produced a million times in the Mullca 511 and 510 variants.
In the 1980s, scientists discovered that the lower end of the backrest was not arching enough and was damaging the back. The Mullca chair no longer did justice to the morphological changes of the students. All of this led to the closure of the Mullca factory in 1996.
The Mullca chair remains one of the rare testimonies to French chair design of the 1950s. Since 2013 there has been a label edition of the kitchen furniture company Plastilux , which produces an original version in small numbers under the name “La 510 Originale”.
Trivia
On November 20, 2005, the TV broadcaster Arte broadcast a report by the French journalist Corinne Delvaux, in which she published the story and the following comparisons with the Mullca chair: 12 years of school times 26 weeks of school times an average of 30 hours of lessons - that's 9,360 hours. Every Frenchman has spent at least 9,360 hours on this chair by the end of production. The Mullca 510 has thus imprinted itself on the collective subconscious.
literature
- Carole Daprey: Mobilier design pour enfants , Piqpoq, 2009 ISBN 978-2-918730-00-2
Individual evidence
- ↑ l'objet: la chaise Mullca ( Memento of the original from July 25, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on arte.tv (French)
