There is a good chance you have seen this chair before, even if you never noticed it.
In The Dark Knight, during one of the most memorable scenes in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, the Joker sits in an interrogation room while Batman tries to get answers out of him, and between the two of them is a rather ordinary-looking aluminium chair. It is not part of the plot, nobody talks about it and, as usual with great design, it is almost invisible.
But this particular chair has a story that is almost as good as the movie.
It is the 1006 Navy Chair, made by American furniture company Emeco, and while Hollywood discovered it as the perfect chair for interrogation rooms, it was originally designed for a much more serious situation: war.
In the early years of World War II, the U.S. Navy was trying to remove anything from its ships that could burn. After a series of devastating fires, materials such as rugs, curtains and cork insulation were banned, and even wooden mess benches became a problem.
The Navy needed a chair that was lightweight, waterproof, resistant to fire and corrosion, and strong enough to survive the kind of abuse that comes with life at sea. The original brief reportedly demanded something that could even withstand a torpedo blast.
Engineer Wilton C. Dinges took the challenge and chose aluminium, a material that was both light and corrosion-resistant, but wartime shortages meant he could only get the softest aluminium available, much of it recycled from scrap. Rather than seeing that as a problem, Dinges used the material’s flexibility to shape the chair before subjecting it to a series of heat and acid treatments that made it exceptionally hard. The result was a chair weighing just seven pounds but capable of supporting around 1,700 pounds.
To convince the Navy, Dinges apparently did what any sensible furniture designer would do when faced with sceptical military officers: he took the chair to the eighth floor of a Chicago hotel and threw it out of the window. The chair survived.
The Navy was convinced, and in 1944 the first 1006 chairs went into service, including aboard submarines.
Almost 80 years later, the chair is still being made in Hanover, Pennsylvania, using essentially the same philosophy. Each one passes through a remarkable 77-step process involving forming, welding, grinding, heat treatment, finishing and anodising, with the work done largely by hand.
That is also why copying the shape is easy, but copying the chair is not.
Emeco estimates that the Navy Chair can last for 150 years, and the company gives it a lifetime warranty. The aluminium is recycled, endlessly recyclable and, perhaps most importantly, the chair was designed from the beginning to be something you buy once and keep for a very long time.
After the war, the Navy Chair found its way into government buildings, prisons, hospitals, restaurants and schools, before eventually becoming a favourite of architects and designers. When Gregg Buchbinder took over Emeco in 1998, he discovered that the company’s customer list included names such as Giorgio Armani, Frank Gehry and Philippe Starck, and the chair began its transformation from military equipment into a design classic.
Today, you can find it in restaurants, hotels, offices and homes around the world, as well as in films such as I Robot, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Terminator Genisys and The Dark Knight. Which makes the Batman connection strangely appropriate.
The Joker may have been sitting in one of cinema’s most famous interrogation scenes, but the chair beside him had already survived warships, submarines, fire, salt water, decades of commercial use and a fall from a 12th-floor window.
In the end, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the 1006 is not that it survived all of that, but that it was never really designed to become a classic. It was simply designed to last.
