From the category archives:
Recently USA, Kalamazoo, MI based Landscape Forms has introduced its striking Metro40 line of city furniture designed by or in cooperation with BMW Group DesignworksUSA. The Benches come in aluminum or aluminum with wood, with or without back. I like them with back better. Curious how they will withstand wear and tear.
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Piano Bench Maria Van De Velde by Henry Van De Velde
I love the cleanness lines, the elegance of the black and the architectural form of this Piano Bench. Learn more about the great architect, designer, and teacher Henry Van De Velde through Henry Van De Velde Foundation.
Like the tea table or occasional table Curt Herrmann, this piano bench dates from 1902. It was verifiably commissioned for the music-room in the flat kept by Karl Ernst Osthaus in the Folkwang Museum he founded in Hagen. Delivered to the drawing-room of Zeemeeuw House in Scheveningen at almost the same time, these first two exemplars were made at Lösse, Carpenters and Joiners, in Hagen and first by Scheidemantel in Weimar.
Henry van de Velde’s exclusive clientele viewed itself as a cultural elite and this status consciousness was not least reflected in the commissions given to the Belgian designer. This was a circle in which literary and artistic interests reigned supreme and both classical and modern music were cultivated. Even though van de Velde’s new designs for sculptural concert grand pianos (for Karl Ernst Osthaus and the Weimar Nietzsche Archives) were not so successful, the piano bench was ordered by several clients.
Henry van de Velde together with family - house 'Hohe Pappeln', 1912 in Weimar
Helene von Nostitz and Sophie Herrmann, to name two of them, were gifted pianists and so was Maria van de Velde, who before her marriage had wanted to become a concert pianist.
The 1902 piano bench attests particularly eloquently to the artist’s fresh start at Weimar. The fluid ornamental line of the early work he did in Brussels and Berlin has yielded to a dynamic created solely by the tensions of tectonic construction. Van de Velde’s artistic creed, Line is power is echoed eloquently in the harmonious design of this felicitous piece of furniture.
It was made in various natural woods and hardwoods as well as in cream and midnight blue lacquer. Only two have survived: Maria van de Velde’s piano bench (midnight blue lacquer: Ghent Museum for the Applied Arts) and a second of unknown provenance (ebony: private collection in Germany).
Executed in solid beechwood, stained
Dimensions: H: 62 cm, W: 116 cm, D: 47 cm, SH: 47 cm
Design: Henry van de Velde
Extant exemplar: Ghent Museum for the Applied Arts
Manufacturer: ADELTA
via Henry Van De Velde and Bonluxat.
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The Ro Ro Rocking Chair by Tomoko Azumi of T.N.A. Design Studio for Zilio Aldo & Cy
T.N.A. Design Studio is based in East London and led by Tomoko Azumi.
Tomoko on the Ro Ro Chair and the cooperation with Zilio Aldo & Cy:
It is a rocking chair made from steam bent beech. The front legs and rocking runners share the same curve, and the arm & backrest is formed from a single piece of solid timber.
Zilio Aloo & Cy is located near Udine, centre of Italian chair industry for years, has been supplying good quality wooden parts for Italian big players for more than 70 years. Since the recent shift of manufacturing to Eastern Europe and the far East, this local network of factories has been struggling to survive. I met a young successor of a factory, who is now trying to set up an own brand, then started a project to rescue their fine tradition of wood bending, which is brought to their area when it was a part of Austria.
Via T.N.A. Design Studio.
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Hot from the e-mail a press release that is well worded albeit dated november 2009:-)
I have a soft spot for Emeco that as a long standing family run Chair Manufacturer tries new venues, be it it in advertising ( see Emeco: An Old Chair Manufacturer Goes Nude) or in chair design.
Therefor the integral Press release here:
Emeco Collaborates with Michael Young on Lancaster, a New Collection
Emeco, The Aluminum Chair Company, will present a new furniture collection by British designer Michael Young at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, April 14 – 19 in Milan. The collection of stacking chairs, barstools and tables is Emeco’s first foray into component-based design incorporating cast aluminum seats and backs with carved ash-wood legs. The ash-wood components are made by Emeco’s partner, an Amish factory in nearby Lancaster County PA, providing the collection its name, Lancaster.
“I have worked extensively with the aluminum manufacturing process recently, and with some of the best equipped factories in Asia. I was looking at the ways to join other materials with aluminum over the last few years and thinking about a chair, “explained Mr. Young.
“My work with the bicycle manufacturer, Giant, pushed me away from using standard section metal tubing. The sculptural form of the chair leg could only be made in wood. When I found that Emeco has partnered with a remarkable wood factory, the project gelled. It is an immense privilege to work with the Emeco family, I am sincerely proud in a way I have not felt previously. And I do feel the project fits me well with my love for and industrial heritage and what I consider to be the real thing.
I feel passionate about working with natural materials that live for ever; wood and metal are really the materials that connect to the human so there was no question that the richness of their aging processes is a prefect combination I felt would be contrasting in the Emeco collection. I felt that using wood would create a softer edge to a product whilst the aluminum would keep to sophistication and heritage.
For me the new chair was much needed, not as a vanity but as good sold piece of industrial hardware for both domestic and contract markets.”
Lancaster features an indestructible, cast aluminum seat and back in dark anodized and machine polished finishes. The wood legs are available in natural ash-wood and dark stain ash-wood. The chair, which stacks six high, retails starting at €315 ex VAT, and will be available in May 2010.
Michael Young
Born in Sunderland, England in 1966, he studied furniture and product design at Kingston University between 1989 to 1992 . In 1994 Young opened his own studio in London and a second think space in the Icelandic capital, Reykjavik, which became his home for a short while. He has since developed products and furniture for such manufacturers as Cappellini , Magis and Rosenthal, bicycles for Giant, telephones for Native Union , interior projects such as Pissarro restaurant in Hong Kong. In 2006 he relocated his head office to Hong Kong to work with advanced technical industries creating a bridge between global industries employing the office.
He this years Creative Director of 100% Design Shanghai and Asian Aerospace events .Emeco
Emeco was founded in 1944 to make all-aluminum chairs for the US Navy. Gregg Buchbinder purchased the company in 1998 and began a friendship and association with the renowned French architect, Philippe Starck, creating a series of products that united Emeco’s historic manufacturing capabilities with Mr. Starck’s classic designs for a new century. In 2000, Mr. Starck’s Hudson chair for Emeco won the GOOD DESIGN Award and was inducted into the permanent design collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.In 2004, Emeco collaborated with the American architect Frank Gehry on Superlight, a chair that utilizes aluminum’s ability to be both strong and flexible. Mr. Gehry’s chair won another GOOD DESIGN award in 2004 and was included in collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Pinakothek der Modern in Munich. In 2007 Emeco’s collaboration with Norman Foster “20-06” debuted at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile and won another GOOD DESIGN award, as well as a 2007 Spark Design Award. Emeco launched the Nine-O collection by Ettore Sottsass – the last design by Mr. Sottsass who died in 2007 at the age of 90, and Morgans, a chair designed by Andrée Putman for the Morgans hotel renovation in New York.
From a workforce of 15 craftsmen in 1998, Emeco has quadrupled its size and recently instated a second manufacturing shift for the first time in 25 years. Emeco has made over 1,000,000 1006 Navy® chairs since 1944 and now sells its all-aluminum furniture in 50 countries.
Thank you Dan Fogelson
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Not only in a blue mood but also in a Chinese design mood…
Via Antique Spider I found this traditional Chinese Wedding Chair.
The bride was taken to her husband’s home sitting on the chair right after the wedding celebrations. It was tradition. Her feet were bound as was the custom.
See also this painting.
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As I’m in a bit of a blue mood – bit more blueish design here and blue fingers from migrating the site and cleaning it up a bit – here a blue Chinese Chair by Ren Xiaoyu. The chair is modelled after a Chinese character.
Found at Gallery Rhino3…I have to check that out…Ah Rhino is a modeling and rapid prototyping piece of software and they have more chair candy.
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This Hiroshima Chair by Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa comes from my pile of draft posts I’m trying to clean up now. I’ve more Naoto Fukasawa on the back burner.
Via Designboom
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On another tack: The Lutyens Bench. Everybody will immediately recognize this bench as The Lutyens Bench. Actually it is called the Thakeham Bench.
A granddaughter of Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens (1869-1944), Candia Lutyens, started Lutyens Furniture Limited in the UK
She writes about Lutyens:
Edwin Lutyens is often described as the greatest British architect of his age. …
.. That Lutyens was a designer of furniture is not well known. His designs, though numerous, were always produced in small quantities and for a specific effect that was always a complement to the whole. Sadly, almost no Lutyens’s interiors survive intact and many pieces of furniture have been lost. Thus it is that Lutyens’ furniture has never become part of the general consciousness, although on the merits of the designs alone it should rank with, and take its natural place alongside the furniture of all the ‘Twentieth Century Greats’. As with his architecture, Lutyens in his furniture designs makes specific reference to, and is influenced by, the substance and course of the great English tradition of furniture making.
Similarly too, the form, the style and the synergy all bear the stamp of his own individuality. Precise and intricate mathematical details lend an element of surprise and Lutyens’ well-renowned love of jokes and ‘visual puns’ is self-evident in many of the tricks he employs. The result is, like many of his buildings, absolutely controlled yet somehow astonishing – at first sight conventional, yet encompassing at a second glance both the whimsical and the paradoxical. In making Lutyens’ furniture to his own drawings, the task of Lutyens Furniture Limited was both unique and daunting in its application. Our responsibility to the designs dictated that our prime and overriding principle is that the quality of what we produce should be as high as is possible to achieve. We therefore go to considerable lengths to employ the best craftsmanship that is available, in using traditional methods of construction and upholstery, and to comply with Lutyens’ own tastes in terms of materials and timbers. As a result, we have total confidence that these pieces will continue for generations as furniture always used to and as it should.
Candia Lutyens via Lutyens Furniture Limited.
About the Thakeham Bench Candia writes:
The Thakeham seat pictured here in English Oak was designed for the garden at Little Thakeham near Storrington, West Sussex. The rhythmical symmetry of the bench is typical of Lutyens’s love of form. The bench has become an archetypal design in its own right and has sadly, for many, lost its association with Lutyens. It is made all over the world to varying degress of quality (absense thereof). There are no makers of this bench other than LFL that are authorised by the Lutyens family.
I believe it is a bit like aspirin. Aspirin originally was a brand name for a pill Bayer developed. Later on aspirin became a name for anti headache pills in it’s own right, whereupon Bayer lost its intellectual property rights.
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The Prism stool by Brooklyn (which is American English for the Dutch town of Breukelen), New York, USA based Gregory Buntain is composed of repurposed Walnut.
Triangular scraps are formed into an intricate pattern of hardwood end grain.
The hexagonal structure is extended in the three faceted legs.
With its 19.5 inches height this stool can also be used as a side table.
Via Prism Stool by Gregory Buntain.
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Possibly Green too!
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