Shiro Kuramata’s approach to designing objects was informed by the innovation in postwar Japan. By 1970, he had introduced alternative materials such as acrylic and glass into his furniture, which played on traditional ideas of materiality and form.

Transparency, the appearance of weightlessness, and a Minimalist vocabulary quickly became his signature aesthetic. In 1976, Kuramata designed Glass Chair. Its reductivist and planar form reflects his interest in geometry as well as the effect of light as it transforms and illuminates the glass. Kuramata, like many of his Japanese contemporaries, looked to Western culture for inspiration. In particular, the sculptures of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin influenced Kuramata's furniture designs of the 1970s, such as this one.