Chairs, Chair Design and Chair Designers
In September, 2011, I visited the Milan Triennale Design Museum which has many designer chairs on display and in its permanent collection. I’ll devote a some posts to their collection.
This Rose Chair was designed by Masanori Umeda for Edra.
Via wyckoffwoodworks:
“Anziano” Side Chair /1989-1990
Designer: John Hutton
Manufacturer: Donghia Furniture
Bent plywood, steel, rubber
31 3/4 x 19 7/8 x 20 7/8 in. (80.6 x 50.5 x 53 cm)
In 2008 this chair was donated as lose parts in a bag to the Centraal Museum of Utrecht, a Dutch museum with a large collection of Rietveld furniture. Although the design was known. It was believed this chair was never produced. Well until it was donated to the museum: It appeared a small Dutch manufacturer by the name of Hopmi had produced some pieces. Originally Hopmi produced locks for bikes, but in the prewar 30ies it ventured into furniture because of the economic depression. The chair can be taken apart and stored as a flatpack. Ikea avant la lettre.
Via Design Blog.
Just to demonstrate how wonderfully small the world has become with Internet:
I searched a bit on Hopmi and it turned out that the factory made other parts for bikes as well. I found this shield:
Found on a Dutch Blog reporting about a visit of the China Bicycle Museum in Beijing….where this Hopmi shield was on display.
Via Chinablog.nl
Found this piece at Designbooms article still life with chair – installations and manipulations of the undemanding object. It is part of the MoMa Collection.
A long time ago we featured the Relief Chair by Ben K. Mickus.
Last year Cooper Hewitt added it to its permanent collection.
I revisited his site because I remembered it is exemplary with respect to public relations: For instance Bloggers who have mentioned the chair get a whole page (click “news” and “blogs” on his site):
Exemplary in design and simplicity: The thumbnails are linked to a pdf of the article and the www link under the thums link to the actual article.
Fondly I saw the old layout of our site: For a long time we’ve used the WordPress default theme:
So you can see blogs do change their lay out. Also I’ve noticed I changed the title of the post and I see other things I don’t do anymore. Oh Nostalgia.
On the other hand I’d hoped to see Ben going on with designing some more chairs.
Note: in writing this post I got so annoyed with the load time of the posts and pages due to load time consuming social bookmarks that I’ve totally disabled them. Sorry lads and lasses!