Thonet × Campagnolo

Announced September 21, 1978, at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, the S 78 Record began as a problem Thonet had been failing to solve for a century: how to make a bentwood chair fold without it wobbling. The Frankenberg design office, led on this project by Gerd Lange, had tried hinges, pins and brass sleeves. None survived a year in a busy café. Lange's answer was to stop thinking like a furniture maker and ring Vicenza.

Campagnolo's engineers, working under Valentino Campagnolo, treated the chair as a frame. The four joints where the steam-bent beech meets are forged aluminium lugs, machined and hand-polished in the same workshop as the firm's hubs, with the wood bonded and pinned inside them exactly as tubing sits in a bicycle lug. The chair folds flat when a single quick-release lever beneath the seat, a shortened version of the Record hub skewer, is flipped open. Closing it clamps the frame with a firm, audible click.

Reviewers were divided. Domus called it the most honest folding chair since the Thonet No. 1, while the German trade press complained that a café owner should not need to understand cam tension to stack his furniture. Cycling clubs across the Veneto bought them anyway, and several team service courses used them in race convoys, where they folded into the boot of a Fiat 131 estate beside the spare wheels.

Each chair shipped with a Campagnolo corkscrew held in a sprung clip under the seat rail. Thonet's own catalogue insisted this was for maintenance, since the lever's cam could be adjusted using the corkscrew's hex-shaped foot. Nobody believed this, and the clip was quietly deleted from the 1980 catalogue.