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The award-winning Revolt Chair is an icon in the history of industrial design in the Netherlands. It was designed by Friso Kramer, manufactured by De Cirkel and launched by Ahrend in 1955. Kramer was looking to create a light, slender and indestructible chair. Instead of using traditional steel tubing, he developed a frame of bent sheet steel. It became the ideal chair to furnish offices, canteens, classrooms and living rooms. As a ‘public’ piece of furniture it has become part of the collective memory.

When Kramer designed the Revolt chair, he was about 31 years old. Too young, really, in his own opinion, to be able to produce a well-balanced design. ‘Good designers under 35/40 don’t exist,’ he once said. ‘You have to know great joy; you have to know great sorrow; you have to know pain, release; it has to be mature. For him, as for man of his colleagues, that process had been accelerated during the wartime occupation. After that he no longer had time for playful experiments and idealistic theories. The responsibility of enabling everyday life to function as well as possible was of greater import: perfectly working products, ergonomics, user-friendliness, that was what counted for everyone. To Kramer beauty was only relative. A beautiful chair that is unaffordably expensive or uncomfortable to sit in is hideous. He resolutely asserted: ‘If design is to fulfill a broad social objective, it must be as anonymous as possible.’

Ahrend officialy introduced the chair in May 1955, on one of the last pages of a brochure and with a proverbial drum roll. ‘And finally…the Revolt.’ The Revolt’s commercial breakthrough, according to company historian Dirk de Wit, began primarily in Rotterdam. The chair attracted the attention of a public sensitive to trends and of architects with thick order books. With its attractive shape and indestructible construction, it rapidly found its way into newly built schools, office buildings, libraries and factory canteens. According to Brattinga, waiting lists even became necessary at one point, bearing the names of hundreds of buyers.

The creation of the Revolt chair
By the launch of the Revolt chair, Kramer had for several years been given the time and space not to have to sit at the drawing table for eight hours a day at the factory, at De Cirkel. It was an unprecedented privilege at the time, an ideal situation of which many of his colleagues could only dare to dream. De Cirkel also started getting increasingly possessive about its designer. On 8 June 1955 the management informed him he was no longer permitted to produce freelance furniture designs for office and home decoration outside the company ‘insofar as these are fully or partial made of metal’.

Kramer had earned the freedom he had at the factory in designing the Revolt thanks to a chair produced a little earlier, the PK chair, a reference to the initials of Penraat and Kramer, who had designed it together. The fact remains that both designers were determined to move beyond the tubular chair, which any village blacksmith could make. Their chair marked the end of an era. No tubing, for a steel furniture manufacturer, left only two options: chairs with an undercarriage of solid steel (steel bars) or chairs with an undercarriage of sheet steel bent into a U-shaped profile. The profile won out. An experiment of Kramer and some technicians shoed that U-shaped profiles were more pressure-resistant than solid steel bars. Sheet steel had the additional advantage of not needing to be the same thickness throughout, but only thick at those points in a structure subject to the greatest force. This not only saved unnecessary expense, it also produced a lighter chair.

So the idea to work with profiled sheet steel was there in Zwanenburg, but the step to actually build a chair needed one last push. In March 1988, in an interview with architect Maarten Kloos, Kramer’s words revealed that the immediate cause of the Revolt had been rather prosaic, almost embarrassingly commercial. No elevated ideals, but the jealousy inducing success of the 116 chair Wim Rietveld had designed for Gispen around 1952, a sober chair for a little over 26 guilders, with a steel bar frame and a seat and back of bent beech plywood mounted on gently springy rubber discs. Three days later the chair was born. Once the design of the Revolt was down on paper in broad outline, the long road to its production began. According to company historian Dirk de Wit the first series were fragile and De Cirkel regularly received complaints about the Revolt. The definitive working diagram was not produced until 1955, complete with a specification of every component.

Characteristics
The problems that other designers also had to overcome in making the shell were also encountered by Kramer when he worked on the design of the seating element for the slender undercarriage. It had to be different from the usual plywood, which looked far too heavy for the sheet steel structure. Kramer was looking for a material that was as thin as a gramophone record, no more than 4 mm, strong and yet flexible. In the summer of 1954 there was industrious experimenting in the search for the right seat form. The back and seat shells of the chair were ultimately made of a new type of synthetic material: synthetic phenol-formaldehyde resin, which had previously been used only for laminating veneer, on a paper base. De Cirkel named it Cirahflex, but that made-up name no longer means anything to anyone today. Optically the back and seat did not differ widely from the familiar laminated wood. But the material was a lot thinner and it definitely did not look like plastic.

The chair looked simple and elementary. Yet manufacturing the design required 17 different parts: two sets of legs, two back braces, a lateral connection tube, four glider holders, two inner Us, a back, a seat, two black plastic back buffers, two pressure bolts for the back, two speed nuts for the back, four black plastic seat buffers in two different thicknesses, four pressure bolts for the seat, four speed nuts for the seat, four black plastic gliders, two sheet steel seat support and two speed-nut-fastening Us. The ‘speed nuts’, a revolutionary click system for attaching the back and seat to the frame, were produced at De Cirkel.

Measurement
Once the Revolt had overcome its teething troubles and once the seat had been made a bit more ample after a few years, it remained unaltered for over 25 years. Initially the seat shell measured 42 by 40 cm: 1962 its dimensions were 45.5 by 42.5 cm. The height of the seat remained the same: 45 cm. so did the total height of 80.5 cm.

Material changes
Around 1960 an upholstered version (polyether on wood) came out especially for auditoriums and more luxurious offices, with an upholstery fabric produced in eight colours at De Ploeg in Bergeijk.

Colors
In the beginning the frame was enameled in grey tones only: Neutral grey (light grey), Hexagon grey (elephant grey), machine grey (blue grey) and olive green (green gray). The back and seat were immediately available in 16 different colours: bright red, russet, brick red, mustard, yellow green, forest green, olive green, slate blue, elephant grey, pearl grey, Neutra grey, cream, light cream, off-white, matte black and black. The wide choice for the customer elicited mixed feelings among the design team at De Cirkel. Kramer explicity argued for producing hairs in a monochrome version only. ‘The use of multiple colours threatens to become a trend,’ his colleague Wim Rietveld similarly warned in an extra Ahrend publication, entitled Kleur. Vorm. Functie (Colour. Form. Function).

Prices
The chair cost 36 guilders in the first year. Today that would be the equivalent of the not exactly modest amount of 120 euros. In 1958, the last year the design was in production, only an upholstered version was available, with a price tag of at least 182.75 guilders, plus VAT. By that time hundreds of thousands of units had been sold, ‘about 20,000 a year,’ estimates Bas Pruyser, who joined the Ahrend design team in the 1970s.