Emeco 1006 Navy Chair

The 1006 is a plain side chair made entirely of aluminium. Its back is a rounded hoop holding three narrow vertical slats that stop at a curved crossbar above the seat; the seat is a single shallow-dished pan; the four square legs splay slightly and are braced by a stretcher at the front and sides. Brushed, it has a soft grey sheen. It weighs about three kilograms, and looks as though it were cast in one piece, though it is welded from twelve.

It was made for war. In 1944 the US Navy wanted a chair for its ships that would be light, would not rust in salt air and would not burn, and Wilton C. Dinges, who had just founded the Electrical Machine and Equipment Company, developed one with the help of Alcoa. Eye bolts under the seat let crews lash it to the deck. To win the contract, the story goes, Dinges threw a chair from an eighth-floor hotel window in Chicago; it bounced and did not break.

Emeco settled in Hanover, Pennsylvania, and after the war sold the chair to prisons, hospitals and government offices, by the mid-1950s at the rate of 200,000 a year. When the contracts dwindled the company nearly failed, was sold in 1979, and survived by selling to restaurants. In the 1990s designers, among them Giorgio Armani and Philippe Starck, began to buy it for its plain, durable form, and the chair passed from mess decks and waiting rooms into cafés and showrooms.

The 1006 is still made in Hanover, by hand, in a sequence of 77 steps: aluminium tube is bent, notched and welded, the joints ground smooth, the frame heat-treated to harden it and anodised to protect it. The metal is now largely recycled. More than a million had been made by 2012, and Emeco, which calls the chair unimproved since 1944, still sells it with a guarantee for life.