Molteni magazine | Design | The Monk Chair

The Monk Chair

Oli Stratford for M Magazine, March 2025

THIS YEAR, MONK RE-ENTERS MOLTENI&C’S CATALOGUE MARKING 35 YEARS SINCE THE CHAIR WAS LAST IN PRODUCTION. “DESIGNED BY AFRA AND TOBIA SCARPA, ‘MONK’ IS SIMPLE AND SOLID,” READS THE COMPANY’S 1990 CATALOGUE, THE SIMPLE SERIF FONT SET OFF BY A PHOTOGRAPH OF TWO MONK CHAIRS, TIPPED BACK ON THEIR REAR LEGS AS IF PREPARING TO MARCH FORWARD.

Today, as Monk prepares itself to step foot into the present, this description of “simple and solid” remains a strong summation of its virtues, but the chair's simplicity conceals the sophistication of the design approach that led to its initial creation back in 1973. Looking at the 1990 image, Monk belies its age. The chair’s seat and back are leather, tautly slung between a concealed metal structure that screws into a wooden frame: a set of conjoined front and rear legs, joined by simple crosspieces.

The 2025 re-edition of the Monk Chair by Tobia and Afra Scarpa. Photographs: Frederik Vercruysse

Tobia Scarpa and his Monk Chair

We selected the most suitable and appropriate materials to make the object, which is a light thing – pleasant

recalls Tobia Scarpa (b.1935), who designed the chair with his wife and partner Afra (1937-2011).

The chair is refrained, lightweight, dismountable and beautifully crafted, delighting in the quality of the simple materials. Were documentation of its existence in Molteni’s catalogues throughout the 1970s and 80s not to exist, you might think that it had only just launched.

A 1977 Molteni&C advert featuring the Mou table and Monk chairs by Afra and Tobia Scarpa, the 900 series armchairs and sofas by Luca Meda, and the Gloss furniture series by Luca Meda and Renato Fusi.

Monk was designed alongside a table, Mou, as part of the first collaboration between Molteni&C and the Scarpas – the first step of what Tobia describes as “a long journey of inspiration that is still ongoing today”.

Monk Chair by Tobia and Afra Scarpa

Monk Armchair by Tobia and Afra Scarpa

As with many Italian designers of their generation, the pair had trained as architects, graduating from the Università Iuav di Venezia, but subsequently founded a broader design practice, establishing their studio in 1960 in their native Veneto. The couple quickly earned recognition for their industrial architecture for Benetton, the Italian fashion brand, but it was with furniture that they received most acclaim. The pair received the prestigious Compasso d'Oro in 1969 for their Soriana armchair, for instance, whose plump cushioned form (barely contained within a chrome bracket), broke with the strict geometric forms that they felt had otherwise dominated midcentury furniture. It had to be “comfortable enough for people to flop into and relax”, Tobia recalled to The New York Times in 2023.

This interest in challenging orthodoxy in favour of pursuing what they believed was right for a project that was typical of the Scarpas, and it became a driving force behind Monk. The couple’s partnership with Molteni&C began at a time when the radical movement within Italian design exerted considerable influence. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, design groups such as Archizoom, Superstudio, and Gruppo 9999 reinterpreted furniture as a vector for sociopolitical expression, while figures such as Ettore Sottsass created new furniture forms that challenged the rationalism and certainties of the modern movement. By contrast, Monk’s elegant wooden form was traditional and modest, the simplicity and clarity of its construction seeming a world removed from the sinuous (and frequently plastic) furniture being produced elsewhere.

The chair is lightweight and designed for straightforward assembly, with a leather seat, a tubular steel structure and wooden legs.

I can't think of anything that would be faster to execute and assemble,” Tobia remembers of the carpentry techniques employed in his and Afra’s design. “The chair consists of repeated elements, and the visible screws firmly secure the [legs and seat], completing the overall solidity. In the development process of this product, the basic dialogue with those who had to create it remains.

The effect of the Scarpas’ chair was calm, tranquil and composed – hence “Monk” – but this rationality disguised the deeper thinking that lay behind the design.

Monk was intended to look to the history of furniture design, but the Scarpas saw this as an active process that engaged with living culture, rather than a passive restatement of historical form. “I realise that our culture, which ‘museumises’ everything – perhaps without realising it – uses things from the past as if they were dead, but in reality it is precisely in these things that life has settled and continues to settle, continues to live,” Tobia said at the time of Monk’s creation. The Scarpas feared that design, in its drive towards new materials and forms, had undervalued the more traditional values of craft and natural materials – something the architectural historian Catharine Rossi has identified as part of a wider move among Italy’s architects and designers to “[appropriate] craft as an alternative to the values of industrial modernity”. In Monk’s case, the manufacturing expertise of Molteni&C allowed the Scarpas to push their design towards a simple, highly resolved form that made legible the properties and construction methodology of its materials.

Monk Chair by Tobia Scarpa

Monk is quiet in its expression, but seen today it appears as a clear statement of the Scarpas’ design approach: a resistance towards anything as fleeting as a trend, in favour of a deeper focus on material, the needs of the user, and the centrality of craft and manufacturing within design.

Monk Chair by Tobia Scarpa

The secret to the highest quality is to pass unnoticed,” Tobia told Wallpaper in 2009. “[When] you work towards beauty, you don’t have to show it off.

Monk may be understated in this respect, but it also proved highly influential within the Scarpas’ later practice. Its seat construction was redeployed in their 1980 Mastro Chair for Molteni&C (with wood in this instance replaced by tubular metal), while the Mastro’s metal structure was in turn used within their subsequent Meo chair (1981).
“I think that repetition can be a good (and right) thing, as long as it does not inhibit the extraordinary variety of forms, materials, colours, and events that life offers us and that art should at least recognise,”
Tobia has said of the sense of lineage and progression that exists within the Scarpas’ work. Monk, Mastro Chair and Meo may be unique, but all share their creators’ clear approach.

Mastro Chair by Tobia Scarpa

It is an attitude towards design that makes Monk’s return to the Molteni&C catalogue in 2025 something to celebrate. The chair was designed to honour simple, high-quality materials, and the Scarpas’ respect for craft and manufacturing remains as relevant today as ever.

Tobia Scarpa and his Monk Armchair

Monk Armchair

“With Monk,” Tobia adds, reflecting on the design 52 years after its creation, “the choices made affirmed the need to continue with original materials, such as wood and iron, and specific craftsmanship, so that the evident feeling we are used to with quality objects is not lost.” It is a sentiment that is as true in 2025 as it was in 1973, and Monk is now re-emerging into a context in which its virtues are clear. “The chair, in this case, is new, designed yesterday for tomorrow,” reflects Tobia, for whom Molteni&C’s decision to produce a new edition of Monk is recognition of an approach that has not aged a single day. “How can I say,” he responds when asked what Monk’s return means to him, “it’s a gesture of joy.”

Monk ARMChair

Monk Chair

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