Suspens Chair by Paul Boulva for Artopex
Designed 1987
No longer in production
Paul Boulva was a Canadian industrial designer. He graduated from the Université de Montréal in 1972 with a degree in industrial design, and was almost immediately hired as Artopex’s in-house designer from 1972 to 1982. He afterward founded his own company, Art Design International, which specialized in ergonomic office furniture. He is best known in the design community for his Lotus chairs for Artopex. To Trekkies, however, his Suspens chair is immediately recognizeable as the “Ten Forward chairs” of The Next Generation. TNG established these as a sort-of Starfleet standard, and they’d go on to appear in diverse locations throughout series and films, but always in Starfleet settings. The soft upholstery and organic curves of the Suspens are evocative of the work of Jan Ekselius and Pierre Paulin, whom Boulva likely drew inspiration from. It was produced in two heights and with or without armrests.
As a non-Trek aside, an interesting but worrying example of the ways that vintage resellers will sometimes simply repeat each other’s listings without fact checking, I often now see the lounge chair variation of these listed for sale as “Forward Suspension Chairs.” That isn’t what they were called. The lounge chair variation is the Suspension chair, and the new name has caught on from a Furnish Me Vintage listing wherein the sellers listed them as “Ten Forward Suspension Chairs.” Ten Forward, of course, being the name of the bar on the Enterprise-D. Furnish Me Vintage named their listing as such after I pointed out to them that they are the same designer and line as those used in Star Trek. I guess others have seen the listing and interpreted it to mean that they were selling ten (quantity) “Forward Suspension Chairs.” As Paul Boulva has passed and his website is no longer active, I feel its important to document these errors since there are now few primary sources to reference about his work.
References:
Paul Boulva. Industrial Design Curriculum Vitae. 2017.
Gotlieb, Rachel and Cora Golden. Design in Canada Since 1945; Fifty Years from Teakettles to Task Chairs. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf & Design Exchange, 2001.
Used in:
The Next Generation
Star Trek Generations
Star Trek Nemesis
Voyager
Enterprise
