Search for the most iconic chair designs in the world and you'll likely come across a list that includes:
Wassily Chair by Marcel Breuer (1928)
Barcelona Chair by Mies van der Rohe (1929)
Grand Consort by Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier, and Pierre Jeanneret (1928)
The various Eames Chairs (starting in 1945)
Wishbone Chair by Hans Wegner (1949)
Wiggles Side Chair by Frank Gehry (1972)
And the list goes on.
Most of these chairs also look as if they were just designed yesterday. Meaning, they're timeless and have stood the test of time. But they are mostly older designs. Which raises an interesting question: How much does the passage of time play in a role in determining whether or not something is "iconic"?
There are some more recent designs that you could call iconic. The Roly-Poly Chair by Faye Toogood (2014) and the Louis Ghost Chair by Philippe Stark (2002) come to mind. This suggests that really great designs can become immediate classics. (Though, this latter example is a reinterpretation of a classic French chair that in and of itself is an icon.)
What I think is the mostly right answer is that, yeah, sometimes you can catch lighting in a bottle. The Louis Ghost Chair, for instance, is one of the top selling chairs of the 21st century. It's a clever and modern take that used new technologies (as is often the case) to revisit an old classic. Starck nailed it.
But more often than not, you probably need time. Time is what allows the object to form cultural associations in our mind and to prove that it is, in fact, timeless. However, if this is truly the case, then it makes it difficult to determine if we're still producing as many design icons today as we did in the past. We won't really know until they become old.
Image: Louis Ghost Chair via Knoll
Breuer House II is currently on the market in New Canaan, Connecticut for $5.85 million. The house has 4 bedrooms, 4 full bathrooms, and 2 half bathrooms. It is 4,777 square feet and sits on 3.11 acres of land.
Originally built in 1951, the house was designed by the Hungarian-born, Bauhaus-trained, and Harvard-teaching modernist architect, Marcel Breuer. It served as their family home until 1975, after which time it was sold and almost demolished. Thankfully it was instead purchased, restored, and expanded (by another Harvard architect).
Marcel Breuer was a member of what is known as the Harvard Five. They were a group of five architects who either taught at or went to the Harvard Graduate School of Design and who had moved out to New Canaan to build experimental modern homes starting in the 1940s. Homes like Philip Johnson’s Glass House.
Seeing the Breuer House II listed for sale this morning reminded me of how cool it must have been at the time for a bunch of radical architects to move out to a sleepy New England town and start building modernist boxes. I’m sure it pissed off more than a few people.
Does anyone know of anything similar to this happening today? :)
Image from Modern Homes Survey