Design · New York
Reading time: 7 minPierre Paulin wanted to be a sculptor. An injury to his right arm ended it, and he went into furniture instead — where he spent forty years making chairs that were sculpture anyway. GUBI has just spent two years working out how he did it.
The F300 is not a chair that behaves like a chair. It has no flat surfaces. It sits low, curls inward, and encloses you rather than supporting you. Encountered cold, it reads as an object that happens to accommodate a body — not the other way round.
GUBI brought it back to New York during NYCxDESIGN, launching the reissue in partnership with Design Within Reach at their SoHo store with a window installation and an evening for the design press. It looked, in the window on Wooster Street, exactly as strange as it must have looked in 1965.
But the interesting story is not the launch. It is the two years GUBI spent trying to work out how to make it again, and the reason a man made a chair like this in the first place.
Photography: Adrian Gaut, courtesy of GUBI
The sculptor who couldn’t sculpt
Pierre Paulin (1927–2009) is normally introduced as one of the defining figures of French design, which is true and tells you almost nothing.
Here is the detail that explains the work. Paulin failed his baccalauréat. He trained as a ceramist in Vallauris on the Riviera, then as a stone-carver in Burgundy. He was, in other words, on his way to becoming a sculptor until he injured his right arm, an injury serious enough to end that ambition permanently.
He went to the École Camondo in Paris instead, and into furniture.
Hold that alongside the F300 and the rest of his catalogue: the Mushroom (1960), the Tongue, the Ribbon, and a career comes into focus. These are not chairs with sculptural qualities. They are sculptures that have been forced, with slight grudgingness, to accept a sitter. Paulin spent four decades doing the thing that had been taken from him, in the one medium that would still have him.
It is the most useful lens on his work I know of, and it is almost never mentioned.
The establishment caught up quickly. In 1968, three years after the F300 was designed, the Museum of Modern Art acquired both it and the F577 Tongue chair for its permanent collection. In 1969 he took the Design Award of the American Institute of Interior Designers. In 1971 the Mobilier National invited him to furnish Georges Pompidou’s private apartments at the Élysée Palace; in 1983 he was called back to design François Mitterrand’s office. The Centre Pompidou gave him a retrospective in 2016.
A man who could not carve stone ended up furnishing the French presidency.
Photography: Adrian Gaut, courtesy of GUBI
The F300 itself
Designed in 1965 and produced by the Dutch manufacturer Artifort, with whom Paulin had worked since 1958, the F300 was an outright provocation.
Mid-sixties seating was still, broadly, a set of components: a frame, a seat, a back, arms, legs, assembled. The F300 refused the taxonomy. It is a single continuous gesture in fibreglass, upholstered, with no flat plane anywhere on it and no discernible join between the parts a chair is supposed to have.
What it proposes is a different way of sitting. Not upright, not attentive, not the posture of a person at a desk or a dinner; but low, reclined, informal, slightly poured. This was the sixties arguing with the drawing room. Paulin’s chairs assume you would rather be horizontal, and they are usually right.
Fibreglass made it possible. It is a material that permits continuous compound curvature and form without joints, and the F300 exploits this completely. Which is also, sixty years on, exactly the problem.
Photography: Adrian Gaut, courtesy of GUBI
Why the reissue took two years
This is the part the launch coverage skips, and it is the best part.
GUBI could not simply reprint the F300, for two reasons.
The original was partly hand-made. The production process was not fully documented and not fully mechanical; a certain amount of it lived in the hands of the people who made it. GUBI had to reverse-engineer the chair over roughly two years to establish how it had actually been built.
And fibreglass is no longer a defensible material. It is difficult to recycle, unpleasant to manufacture, and increasingly hard to justify. But it was not decorative to the F300, it was structural and formal, the thing that allowed the continuous curve. Remove it, and you have to replace what it did.
GUBI’s answer is HiREK®: a high-performance engineered polymer incorporating up to 30% industrial plastic waste. The reissue is made in Italy, injection-moulded in three components: seat, front leg, and back leg, and then hand-finished.
That specification is the whole story in miniature. Injection moulding is the industrial answer; the hand-finishing is the concession that some of Paulin’s chairs still cannot be automated. Sixty years on, they still can’t fully mechanise him.
HiREK retains what fibreglass gave the chair: the mouldability, the lightness, the durability, the high-gloss surface. Which means the reissue looks and feels like the object Paulin made, without being made of the thing he made it from.
Photography: Adrian Gaut, courtesy of GUBI
Is it actually sustainable?
It is worth being straight about, since “sustainable twist” is doing a lot of unexamined work in most of the coverage.
HiREK is up to 30% industrial plastic waste. Which means it is at least 70% something else. This is a plastic chair with recycled content; a meaningful improvement on fibreglass, particularly on end-of-life recyclability, but not a chair grown from moss.
The stronger environmental argument is one nobody quite makes explicitly: the most sustainable object is the one nobody throws away. The F300 has been desired continuously for sixty years and sits in the collection of MoMA. A chair people keep for decades and then sell rather than discard has already won the argument that most “eco” furniture is still trying to have.
Reissuing a 1965 design in a recyclable polymer is a genuinely reasonable thing to do. Calling it sustainability is a stretch. Calling it better is fair, and enough.
Photography: Kelsey Cherry, courtesy of GUBI
At Design Within Reach, SoHo
For NYCxDESIGN, GUBI took the window at Design Within Reach in SoHo and let the chair do the work — a display built around its silhouette, with an interior setting inside amplifying the flowing line.
The reissue arrives in Alabaster White and Pastel Green bases, with six upholstery options, and is joined by the T877 side table, another Paulin design GUBI has brought back. Together they read exactly as intended: two curved objects that appear to have been extruded from the same idea.
Choosing SoHo for a chair like this is apt. Paulin’s furniture was made for the kind of interior that had recently stopped pretending to be a nineteenth-century room — open, low, unbothered. That is more or less the architecture of a SoHo loft, and it is why the F300 has never looked out of place in New York.
Photography: Kelsey Cherry, courtesy of GUBI
Frequently asked questions
What is the Pierre Paulin F300? A lounge chair designed by Pierre Paulin in 1965 and produced by Artifort — a low, enveloping, single-gesture form in fibreglass with no flat surfaces. MoMA acquired it for its permanent collection in 1968.
Who was Pierre Paulin? A French furniture and interior designer (1927–2009). He trained as a ceramist and stone-carver and intended to be a sculptor, but an arm injury ended that ambition and he turned to furniture. He designed the Mushroom, Tongue and Ribbon chairs, and furnished Georges Pompidou’s private apartments at the Élysée Palace in 1971 and François Mitterrand’s office in 1983.
What is HiREK? The engineered polymer GUBI uses for the F300 reissue, incorporating up to 30% industrial plastic waste. It replaces the original fibreglass while retaining its mouldability, light weight, durability and high-gloss finish.
Why did the reissue take so long? The original was produced through a partly manual process that was not fully documented, so GUBI spent around two years reverse-engineering it — with the hardest problem being a viable replacement for fibreglass.
How is the reissue made? Injection-moulded in Italy in three components — seat, front leg, back leg — then hand-finished.
What colours is it available in? Alabaster White or Pastel Green bases, with six upholstery options. The matching T877 side table has also been reissued.
Photography: Kelsey Cherry, courtesy of GUBI
Final thoughts
A young man loses the use of his arm and with it the possibility of carving stone. He spends the rest of his life making chairs that curve like carved stone, and a museum puts one behind glass.
Sixty years later, a Danish company spends two years working out how the chair was made — and discovers that part of it was never written down, only done by hand. So they make it in Italy, in plastic drawn from industrial waste, and finish it by hand, because there is no other way.
Some things you cannot reverse-engineer. You can only do them again.
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