![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldAt the end of Doors Open yesterday, I made a quick swing by the Design Exchange on Bay Street. There, I ran into the free exhibit Classic Plastics, which has on display some of the most interesting plastic-made products of the mid-20th century and later.
The Oh Chair is below.
It's difficult for me to imagine, from my early 21st century perspective, how revolutionary plastics would have been. Inexpensive and moldable, plastics were the perfect material for the consumer age. That they are linked to so much enduring pollution is a tragedy.
Though a small exhibit, Classic Plastics has a nice collection of diverse products made in plastic. I liked the quiet testimony of this coffee table covered with plastic-made products: albums, a telephone, a cup and saucer. I think the table itself is at least partly made of plastic.
At the end of my tour through the exhibit, I ran into a video monitor displaying the 1964 National Film Board documentary The Magic Molecule, displaying for us something of the wonder that mid-20th century people might have felt with a material that could be made to do anything.
The NFB has, happily for us, uploaded The Magic Molecule to YouTube. The moment I captured on film is visible at 1:06 in this nine-minute documentary.
Classic Plastics will be on view until August.
"There's a great future in plastics," says Mr. McGuire to Benjamin Braddock in 1967's The Graduate. The plastic revolution – embraced after World War II as the new miracle material – began in the kitchen where it replaced metal shelves in refrigerators, was used for Formica countertops, and replaced wooden handles of electric irons and kettles. Plastic offered a dramatic new look to furnishings in the 1960s, and like aluminum and moulded plywood, it transformed design in the last half of the twentieth century and was influential in Canada's first wave of design.
Plastic became a key environmental issue in the 1970s, causing designers to move away from the material. Technology developed for the car industry paired with efforts to protect the environment, gave the material new life in the 1990s. New thermoplastics (a material, usually a plastic polymer, that becomes soft when heated and hard when cooled) can be reformed for greater strength and versatility, use less energy for processing, and are cleaner to produce. Recycling has made plastic acceptable, and improved moulding techniques initiated by computer aided design and lower tooling costs, introduced a new look for polypropylene – the same material Karim Rashid's Oh Chair for Umbra is made out of.
The Oh Chair is below.
It's difficult for me to imagine, from my early 21st century perspective, how revolutionary plastics would have been. Inexpensive and moldable, plastics were the perfect material for the consumer age. That they are linked to so much enduring pollution is a tragedy.
Though a small exhibit, Classic Plastics has a nice collection of diverse products made in plastic. I liked the quiet testimony of this coffee table covered with plastic-made products: albums, a telephone, a cup and saucer. I think the table itself is at least partly made of plastic.
At the end of my tour through the exhibit, I ran into a video monitor displaying the 1964 National Film Board documentary The Magic Molecule, displaying for us something of the wonder that mid-20th century people might have felt with a material that could be made to do anything.
The NFB has, happily for us, uploaded The Magic Molecule to YouTube. The moment I captured on film is visible at 1:06 in this nine-minute documentary.
Classic Plastics will be on view until August.
