Our design intern, Chelsea, is running down a list of some of our favorite European designs at Weisshouse.
Grande Papilio Armchair, Naoto Fukasawa
Fukasawa developed a way of
thinking called “Outline”. Outline is about defining the boundaries of
relationships between objects, people and the environment. Today, Fukasawa is
in Tokyo with a small team, collaborating with many international leading
companies, a professor at Musashino Art University, and a visiting professor at
Tama Art University.
LC4 Le Corbusier,
Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand
The ever so famous “resting machine” designed in 1928. One
year earlier, at age 24, Charlotte Perriand approached Le Corbusier’s asking
for a job and was swiftly rejected with the now infamous line, “We don’t
embroider cushions here.” This closed door didn’t stop her. She designed a bar
made of curved steel, glass, and aluminum for the roof of Paris’ Salon
d’Automne, the annual design festival. Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier’s cousin
and collaborator, brought him to see her design. Le Corbusier was so impressed,
that he apologized and hired her as a furniture designer.
Charlotte Perriand posing on the LC4 Chaise Lounge at the
Salon D’Automne, 1929. It was at that design festival two years earlier that Le
Corbusier had hired her.
Caprice, Philippe
Starck
Philippe Starck has a mission and a vision: creation,
whatever shape it takes, must make life better for the largest number of people
possible. He lives by the approach, “No one is forced to be a genius, but
everyone has to take part.” Starck’s designs extend beyond ergonomic furniture,
including products such as lemon
squeezers, to revolutionary mega-yachts, micro wind turbines, electric cars,
and hotels that aspire to be wondrous, stimulating and intensely vibrant places.
Red and Blue, Gerrit
T. Rietveld
The original chair was constructed of unstained beech wood
and was not painted until the early 1920s. Fellow member of De Stijl and
architect, Bart van der Leck, saw his original model and suggested that he add
bright colors. He built the new model of thinner wood and painted it entirely
black with areas of primary colors attributed to De Stijl movement.
Zig Zag 280, Gerrit
T. Rietveld
Designed in 1934, this natural cherry, gravity defying chair
is one of Rietveld’s most famous designs. Zig-zag is built with four panels
that bend in sequence of an elegant dance to create what may at first seem an
unstable chair, though in reality is very stable. Many knock-offs will show
hardware but the original composition of the chair is flush and seamless.
