Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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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

December 29, 2023

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One response to “When do iconic chairs actually become iconic?”

AM

December 30, 2023

I don’t think it’s the passage of time specifically that creates an icon (although it often helps) but it has to do in my opinion with the quality of materials and manufacture.

As cool as it may look, Starck’s chair is just a plastic mold interpretation of a classic(al) design, but it has none of the tactility, details and intricacies of manufacture of the original. These chairs don’t age well (they look like shit once scratched and become brittle over time).

The other designs you mentioned (except Gehry and some of the Eames’ designs) can be refurbished, mended and repaired and therefore have a much longer lasting value that we don’t see in cheap, plastic designs. Roly-poly and Louis ghost don’t have those qualities, which makes them essentially disposable.

It’s not wonder that old craft furniture is so valuable: it’s no longer made the way it used to, it lasts a long time provided proper care and can be mended if damaged.

I’m betting that we’ll still see Barcelona and Wassily chairs 100 years from now while Starck’s design will have been all but forgotten, becoming a footnote as a passing novelty item. That also applies to the Gehry chair and a lesser extent some of the Eames’ designs.

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When do iconic chairs actually become iconic?

One response to “When do iconic chairs actually become iconic?”

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