Robin Day

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Robin Day

Robin Day (born May 25, 1915 in High Wycombe , Buckinghamshire , † November 9, 2010 ) was an English designer . With his designs he shaped the style of Great Britain and beyond. He became famous for his stackable polypropylene chairs , around 14 million of which were sold.

Life and work

The beginnings

Robin Day's birthplace, High Wycombe, was a hub of the furniture industry. The place was full of carpentry and furniture workshops. In 1931 he began his education at the 1931 High Wycombe School of Art . He then worked as a draftsman in furniture manufacturing. He gained valuable experience about the processes and the working methods of the technicians in production.

In 1934 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London. The design courses were not geared towards industrial design and were disappointing for him, who had already dealt with them in depth in his professional practice. At college, however, he had the freedom and used it to perfect his drawing skills, to study specialist publications and to experience the European and American avant-garde in exhibitions.

When he graduated from college in 1938, there were few vacancies in the furniture industry. Despite his talent, he couldn't find a job. Therefore, he first made models for architects. When the war broke out, he was retired from military service because of his asthma . He found a job as a lecturer at the Beckenham School of Art , where he devised an innovative course on three-dimensional design.

Lucienne and Robin Day

In 1940 he met Lucienne Conradi at a dance event at the Royal College of Art, then a student in the textile department. They married two years later - the beginning of a lifelong partnership. Both achieved the highest reputation in their field; Lucienne Day in textile design , Robin in furniture design. Unlike Charles and Ray Eames , for example , they did not work on common workpieces. However, they supported each other's work through suggestions and discussions. A characteristic external feature of their collaboration were their drawing boards set up back to back.

In 1954 their daughter Paula was born. Lucienne Day died in January 2010.

Breakthrough to fame

In 1948, Robin and Clive Latimer won first prize for cabinet furniture in an international competition organized by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. One of the judges was Mies van der Rohe . For Robin Day, the award was the breakthrough to international fame. The couple Leslie and Rosamind Julius , owners of the Hille furniture company, also became aware of him. Both were just getting ready to consistently convert their company's program to modernity. In 1949 they were able to win him over to work as a designer for Hille. The collaboration lasted for more than twenty years.

Robin Day maintained close ties to the United States. Charles Eames had also won a prize, if “only” a second, at the same MoMA competition. The influence of Eames can be clearly seen in the recessed plywood chairs that Day designed for Hille in 1950. The laminated form exploited the potential of the then newly developed synthetic adhesives. The most commercially successful model was the Hillestak , a lightweight, stackable wooden chair that was manufactured in large numbers for schools, canteens and lecture halls. A copy in the Liberty’s department store cost 66 shillings .

At the Festival of Britain in 1951, Hilles plywood seats were everywhere. The rooms of the home-and-garden pavilion were equipped with the dining table version, with tiltable armrests and steel legs. The pavilion itself was designed by Robin - and the textile furnishings Calyx came from his wife Lucienne.

At the same time, Robin Day was commissioned to design a chair with armrests for the new Festival Hall . It was made of plywood with a rosewood veneer. Robin Day's style met the expectations of its time, it was recognizable modern without being exalted. It is largely thanks to Robin Day and the furniture he designed for Hille that British design received international attention. He was invited to design a section of the Triennale in Milan. His interior design won the gold medal that year.

The 1950s and 1960s

In the 1950s, television found its way into many British households. Robin Day's television set, which he designed for Pye , won a design award from the Council of Industrial Design . He also designed TV armchairs in which narrow shelves for snacks replaced the armrests.

However, he did not limit himself to furniture design. Impressed by Scandinavian design, which claimed that a designer should influence all the details of everyday life, he also worked as a graphic artist, interior designer and product designer. He had already designed posters for the Ministry of Information during the war. He designed the typeface for the Festival of Britain exhibition area.

For Hille he designed the logo and the company typeface as well as the layout of the business letters and the appearance of the lettering for buildings, rooms and the vehicle fleet. This work on the uniform appearance, now commonly known as corporate identity , was a pioneering achievement at the time. The interior of the Hille exhibition hall, built in 1962 by Peter Moro in spectacular architecture, was also designed by Robin Day.

In the 1960s, he finally designed the chair that would become his landmark. The first proposal was for a recessed chair made of fiberglass-reinforced plastic. However, Robin Day was reluctant to simply create a variant of the successful fiberglass that Charles Eames had designed and for which Hille had obtained the UK sales license. Robin's research on the material polypropylene, which Nobel Prize winner Giulio Natta invented in 1954, convinced him that this was the ideal raw material for the really cheap chair for mass production: ideal for injection molding production, and robust in daily use. The seat shell of the Hille chair could be stacked in simple frames and placed on different substructures, be it on a four-legged seat chair substructure, a bar stool construction or permanently installed substructures in halls, stadiums or restaurants.

Hille invested £ 6,000 in production machinery. From the first batch, the company sent 6,000 copies free of charge to architects, designers and critics. The chair was a sensational success; After a short time, around 50 companies worldwide were producing it under license. A smaller, particularly robust version was made for schools.

A large number of venues were equipped with this chair in the 1960s: the new Nottingham Playhouse , the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon , the five lecture halls in the Barbican Center and finally the 38,000 seats in the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City .

Robin Day also designed the interior of BOAC aircraft in the 1960s.

The two days had now become stars. Articles about her appeared regularly in publications on living and design; they were popular interview partners and had advertising contracts. They were portrayed as a glamorous couple in advertisements from the Smirnoff company . Robin Day designed the interiors for the John Lewis department store chain in Brent Cross in the 1970s and for Waitrose on Finchley Road in London in 1981 .

Hard times

A difficult time came in the 1980s. Hille had got into economic difficulties. Other designers were recruited. The collaboration with Hille ended when the company was sold in 1983. Modernity became popular with the masses, and designs based on the great designers of the 1950s and 1960s were mass-produced. The once exciting, original modernity had, in Day's own words, degenerated into mediocrity.

Renewed appreciation

In the 1990s, the appreciation for the original grew again. Original furniture based on his designs from the 1950s and 1960s achieved high sales prices. 1991 was the exhibition design in the 50s in the Manchester City Art Galleries place. Some of his old designs were re-produced by British and Italian companies. New designs were added, for example the shaped steel Toro chair, designed in 1990 , with which London underground trains are equipped. A major exhibition of his and his wife Lucienne's work was held in 2001 at the Barbican Center.

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personal data
SURNAME Day, Robin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English designer
DATE OF BIRTH May 25, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH High Wycombe , Buckinghamshire
DATE OF DEATH November 9, 2010