Tomato Chair

The Finnish designer Eero Aarnio, born in 1932, studied from 1954 to 1957 at the Institute of Industrial Arts in Helsinki and started in 1962 with his own office as an interior and industrial designer. Aarnio was - and still is - one of the pioneers in using plastic in industrial design. Plastic material set the designers free to create every shape and use every color they wanted. This gave birth to objects oscillating between function and fun, but always fascinating ones.

Aarnio about Tomato Chair: ‘A product idea can come about in many different ways and here is one of them. I realized that Pastil Chair floats and carries the person who sits in it in water but it is very rickety. If there were three items like two great armrests and the back of the chair would be stable, and this is how the idea of the TOMATO Chair was born.’
The Tomato Chair visualizes how Aarnio plays with round shapes. At the first sight the Tomato Chair looks complicated, but the second look shows an intelligent combination of 3 circles with same diameter, two of them being armrests, one stretched to a comfortable back, and even a fourth half circle up side down giving the chair a consequent seat. When looking at the Tomato Chair from different angles it is more than a chair, it is a sculpture.

140 x 113 x h69,5 cm
Fiberglass, colors : red, white