prototypes operating as three-dimensional sculptural objects with a high aesthetic quality.47 The company’s museum was thus not just used by the firm to display iconic chairs. It was a means to organise organisational times. On occasions this was not simply a matter of remembering or creating coherence between the past and present – looking back at old chairs could also become a means for the company to move forward. This was most clearly demonstrated with the successful of the Drop chair in 2014, originally designed by Arne Jacobsen in 1958. Following interest in the Drop chair, the design manager and designers looked in the archives to find the original product drawings.48 Contemporary designers assumed that in the modernist design firm, the product drawings would typically provide a basis for capturing at least the traits of the object. In line with the work of , the archiving practices of the firm would be replete with times: The archive – the place where the past is consigned and stored up for use in the present – occupies a powerful place in cultures dominated by the written word. In a very public way, the archive demonstrates to a given collective the way in which it manages the tension between remembering and forgetting. (p. 210) The search of the archives, however, revealed more absence than presence. The designs could not be found, and the people responsible for the re-design of the Drop continued to have doubts regarding how the chair was made.49 Fritz Hansen as a firm did not have documents describing the chair’s original curves or the exact original forms. The design team was shocked that the drawings did not exist – they were unaware that the design process of the 1950s mostly involved working on prototypes, drawing on the object rather than on paper (as we illustrated in the development of the Serie7).50 Any sense of a purified and linear time – a well-organised archived time that might be mined for future ideas was rendered unavailable. The chair itself as material semiotic actor would now have to participate in drawing together the past and future. In order to (re)produce the Drop, the Fritz Hansen design team took the model off display in the museum. They removed the upholstery to obtain the bare shell and the original form. They scanned it, transferred the data onto CAD and they used a CNC mill to create a prototype that looked like a one-to-one model. When they compared the prototype to the original, however, the forms did not match.
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