Stacking Chair - Aula | Wilkhahn

Where office spaces are destined for different purposes, furniture offering maximum flexibility is required too. This is why Wilkhahn collaborated with designer Wolfgang Mezger to adapt a vertically stackable multipurpose chair to the requirements of modern working environments and harnessed state-of-the-art plastics technologies where the material and craftsmanship are concerned. The result is a lightweight and hard-wearing plastic chair that comes in a first-class design. Its three-dimensional seat shell offers excellent comfort and support. With a choice of six colors, four types of upholstery, and clever accessories, Aula is a versatile option for traditional multipurpose areas, seminar and meeting rooms, recreational zones, and co-working spaces designed in the look and feel of homes. And what’s more: it’s still stackable.

Whether the chair comes with or without armrests, the frame structure with its distinctive three-dimensional seat shell appears to be seamless. The accurate precision and quality of the surfaces of components in the plastic chair set new standards in the processing of plastics. Six colors, four upholstery types, and the models with and without armrests create 48 basic types for a range of different functions and design concepts. All versions can be linked in rows and up to 16 of them are stackable.

Adaptive Comfort

Whether a multipurpose chair’s destined for lectures, seminars, team meetings or to eat and drink at, it primarily has to be very comfortable. When creating Aula, the designer drew on decades of experience to develop the perfectly shaped seat shell with Wilkhahn’s engineers. The seat shell was honed to perfection following comprehensive sitting tests with people of all different sizes, shapes, and weights. Its three-dimensional shape embraces the body, with ergonomically ideal contours to the seat and backrest. The elasticity of the high-performance plastic also offers exceptional comfort and support. As a result, long meetings become more comfortable events – even when the chair isn’t upholstered.

Integrated Design

The quality of Aula’s design is the second aspect that makes it special. Whether with or without armrests, the shell and frame are a consistent unit with precise and soft lines that suggest the chair is seamless. The armrests are connected in a slightly offset manner, exactly mirroring the sloping rear legs. Placed in a row, the chairs, therefore, leave a very crisp and orderly impression, which is reinforced by the fact that the colors and surfaces of the frames, shells, and armrests are the same. The precise way all the parts are made and joined to produce a harmonious end result places stringent demands on the material and processing technology. Wilkhahn liaised closely with leading experts from the plastics industry to make all parts of the frame from high-performance plastic without requiring any steel core. The use of glass-fiber-reinforced Ultramid® means the chair merely weighs 6 kilos without or 6.7 kilos with armrests. Above all, however, the form and surfaces of the hard-wearing and practical chair are very impressive and virtually beg people to take a seat.

Functionality and Accessories

Two things all models share are that up to 16 can be stacked free-standing and they are suitable for all sorts of purposes. They come with sophisticated accessories, consisting of simple clip-on row- and seat-numbers, slot-on, and fold-up writing tablets plus matching inline connectors and four-wheeled trolleys for up to ten chairs. In addition to a permanent inline connector for rows without armrests, an adjustable inline connector offers maximum flexibility to allow models with and without armrests to be combined as desired.