Perhaps you have it at home, at your kitchen table: a molded plywood chair. It might be an ordinary model by Ikea, or an old Thonet chair that was left discarded at the sidewalk. Maybe you have a beautiful bent wooden chair from the fifties – or even This Chair, designed by Richard Hutten. Well, it doesn’t matter. Just sit down on your chair, close your eyes and – flash! Your chair is a perfect vehicle for time traveling.

In this first episode from our series Time Traveling, designer Richard Hutten and curator Annemartine van Kesteren take you to America at the time of the Second World War. There, Charles and Ray Eames produce splints as well as spectacular chairs out of molded plywood. From here you go back to 1849 Vienna, where industrial thinking begins and results in a worldwide interest in the light, dashing wooden Thonet chairs.