A groundbreaking chair design from 1950s Poland that once caught the attention of legendary architect Le Corbusier has been successfully revived and is now being produced in three different versions. The RM58 chair, originally created by Polish designer Roman Modzelewski in 1958, represents a remarkable story of creative vision, political obstacles, and eventual triumph through academic dedication.
Roman Modzelewski was essentially a self-taught industrial designer who emerged during an era when industrial design wasn't offered as a formal field of study in Poland. During the 1940s, when he reached college age, Modzelewski pursued painting and sculpture at Warsaw's Academy of Fine Arts. His path toward furniture design began in the 1950s after he encountered an Eames chair, which inspired him to experiment with plywood furniture construction. This initial exploration led him to discover fiberglass, a material that was extremely uncommon in Communist Poland at the time.
Through self-directed learning in fiberglass formation techniques, Modzelewski created his masterpiece in 1958 – the striking RM58 chair. The revolutionary design was displayed at various exhibitions throughout Poland, and word of this radical furniture piece eventually spread beyond the country's borders. The chair's innovative form and construction caught the eye of none other than Le Corbusier, the renowned French architect and designer, who expressed genuine interest in potentially producing the chair commercially. However, the Communist authorities in Poland blocked any international commercialization efforts, forcing the design to remain merely a prototype. Frustrated by these political limitations, Modzelewski redirected his fiberglass expertise toward the boatbuilding industry.
The chair's revival story began in the 2000s when Dr. Krystyna Luczak-Surówka, a Polish design historian and lecturer at Modzelewski's former school, rediscovered the forgotten RM58 chair. She began incorporating the design into her academic teachings, introducing a new generation of students to this piece of Polish design history. One of her students, Jakub Sobiepanek, became particularly fascinated with the chair and dedicated both his Master's thesis and diploma project to updating classic Polish industrial designs using contemporary production methods.
In 2012, Sobiepanek joined forces with Dr. Luczak-Surówka to establish VZOR, a Polish furniture brand that essentially served as a real-world extension of Sobiepanek's academic thesis work. The company's inaugural project focused on reviving the RM58 chair, initially offering two distinct versions to modern consumers. The RM58 Classic faithfully replicates Modzelewski's original fiberglass manufacturing process, while the RM58 Matte utilizes modern rotomolded polyethylene construction techniques.
VZOR has since expanded the collection by introducing a third variant called the RM58 Soft, which features upholstery for enhanced comfort. Unfortunately, Modzelewski never witnessed his design finally reach commercial production, having passed away in 1997. Today, American design enthusiasts can purchase the RM58 Classic through the MoMA Design Store, where it retails for $2,000, marking the chair's entry into the international market that was once denied by political circumstances decades earlier.
