McDonald's has been upgrading some of its burger bars with an infusion of high design. Some of the more metropolitan locations have been equiped with, amongst other items, Egg Chairs, designed by Arne Jacobsen in the 1950s. Jacobsen contracted the manufacturing rights to Fritz Hansen, but in England, though not continental Europe, legal protection for the design has expired, as it here runs for only 25 rather than 70 years.
So it is possible to buy 'imitation' Egg Chairs for around £300, whilst the genuine article from Hansen costs about ten times as much. That at least is how it appears to the individual enquirer searching the internet, but reports suggest that Hansen have received 'nearly $2million' for 2500 chairs sold to McDonald's - which works out at $800 a chair.
Never mind the maths. McDonald's, it transpires, has been using the genuine Hansen chairs in its more prominent locations but also imitations in the UK. When Hansen got to know they took offence and declared they would sell no more of their chairs to McDonald's: indeed their CEO declared "we discovered that terrible copies of our furniture were also being used in the U.K. That is unacceptable. We simply will not work with people who use originals where they have to and copies elsewhere, legal or otherwise."
McDonald's respond that they have made their commercial, financial and marketing calculations and will not budge. They also say they explained their intentions to Hansen in advance. They go on to explain that they nowhere suggest to anyone that the 'imitations' are genuine Hnasen-Jacobsens. "No attempt has been made to 'pass off' reproduction chairs as originals in any references or labeling."
Not good enough, respond Hansen. Some of 'their' chairs are right alongside the 'imitations' and the differences are only visible to someone who knows what they're looking for. On the other hand they describe them as "terrible copies". Design purity, it appears is a capsule that, if suitably insulated, can be inserted into any environment. To paraphrase the excellent Hilary Mantel, I am far too snobbish ever to have entered a McDonald's, but I imagine artificial eggs are not the greatest affront to good taste to be encountered there. Apparently the full extent of Hansen's modifications to the purity of Jacobsen's original design was that they 'developed' chairs with 'special colours'.
The refits have been going on for several years and maybe misunderstandings or forgettings have crept in. The designer (of the fit-out of course, not of the chairs), as ever caught between the rock of his client's budget and the hard place of the supplier's prices, hopes for a happy resolution that will enable his project to sail on. A little cultural chauvinism slips in here (the designer, Philippe Avanzi is French): "The concept was to be authentic, and McDonald's was in perfect agreement with that," he says. "I don't feel betrayed, but poorly misunderstood by a few people in England who didn't understand the importance of staying authentic. This was something extremely clumsy, which the English are going to have to rectify. And they will." Or maybe not.
This tale of the interaction of commerce and design under the mantle of aesthetic morality seems typical of the world of design.
