Queen Anne Chair by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

Pomo summer time: Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown aided lead the charge for Postmodernism in America. Their Queen Anne chair – a single of a series of flattened styles produced by the duo in the 1980s – injected humour into the furnishings industry and is the up coming in our summer season series on the controversial movement.

American architect Venturi became a essential protagonist of Postmodernism following publishing his 1966 essay, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, and finishing the Vanna Venturi property – credited as the initial Postmodern constructing.

He married British architect and planner Denise Scott Brown in 1967, and the pair worked with each other to use their Postmodern concepts to “turn about the culture of architecture” employing a new way of hunting a historical styles, according to Scott Brown.

Following a series of architecture projects, Venturi and Scott Brown determined to apply these tips at a smaller sized scale. They created a assortment of chairs for Knoll in the early 1980s, at a time when Postmodernism was already filtering into style through the Memphis Group.

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Portrait by Matt Wargo, courtesy of VSBA

The duo’s aim was to make furnishings that could be very easily and cheaply made – aligning with the suggestions of Modernism – whilst providing a new consider on the decorative aspects of historic types.

Unlike numerous architects and designers associated with Postmodernism, Venturi and Scott Brown avidly wave the flag for the movement they have spent their careers exploring and refining.


Related story: The Dezeen guidebook to Postmodern architecture and design and style


“A vision that Bob had… was that you must be capable to use industrial production techniques to make furnishings, which is also reminiscent historically,” Scott Brown informed Dezeen. “And that decoration is part of communication.”

The eagerly anticipated assortment incorporated a broad selection of major historical furnishings designs, like Chippendale, Queen Anne, Empire, Hepplewhite, Sheraton, Biedermeier, Gothic Revival, Artwork Nouveau and Art Deco.

Queen Anne Chair in a Paola Navone pattern This picture: Queen Anne chair with Paola Navone print. Main image: Queen Anne chair with Grandmother print

Although offered the identical visual flattening treatment – creating the designs search like they had been put by means of a mangle – the carved shapes and flourishes utilised to determine each of these styles all remained obvious in the silhouettes, which took 5 and a half years to refine.

“You can make great complexity with a Chippendale chair, so you flatten out the decoration of a Chippendale chair and you produce a wonderful transitional Chippendale chair,” stated Scott Brown.

“We enjoy transitional things, transitional architecture and transitional furniture,” she added. “All the furnishings in our residence is a mixture of things.”

Despite the fact that the historic designs can still be recognised when viewed from the front, the side view presents thin plywood profiles a lot more reminiscent of 20th-century furnishings pieces by Alvar Aalto and Marcel Breuer.

The typical profile of the chairs in the series The thin plywood profile common of all the chairs in the series for Knoll

“[Venturi and Scott Brown] know what the immediately recognisable qualities of Queen Anne are and zero in on that, like the fantastic visual editors that they are,” mentioned critic and Dezeen columnist Alexandra Lange.

Venturi acquired his interest in furniture from his mom Vanna – for whom the iconic house was designed. She worked as a decorator and collected reproductions of historical pieces. By analysing and drawing different chair styles in his spare time, Venturi learned why decoration was positioned in particular spots and how types produced from 1 yet another.

“The examination of those chairs and the history of them just seeped into his becoming,” said Scott Brown.

The duo created numerous designs for their assortment of seats, but ended up creating the patterns that supplied a broad overview of diverse designs, and that Knoll liked best. Of the final assortment, the Queen Anne, Chippendale and Empire versions were the ones that caught out for Scott Brown. “I think of these 3 chairs as the mama chair, the papa chair and the child chair,” she said.

The Queen Anne chair – primarily based on the furniture style designed in the course of and soon after the reign of the British monarch from 1702 to 1714 – turned out to be a individual favourite for Scott Brown, as a bulge in the form of the seat back assisted relieve her back pain.

Chipendale Chair by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown Chippendale chair

“I had years of back difficulty,” she explained. “When my back was genuinely, truly negative that was the only chair that was comfy for me.”

“Bob could not think that, since he did not feel of himself as obtaining developed with that in thoughts, but Knoll did and they constantly had a model and I would be the one particular to check it. Possessing, by popularity, the greatest negative bottom in the office.”

Knoll kept the task tightly below wraps throughout its growth. When ultimately unveiled at the brand’s New York showroom in June 1984, the chairs received a mixed reaction.


Connected story: Postmodern layout: Carlton bookcase by Ettore Sottsass


“If for some the furnishings is tough to like, it is also challenging to dismiss,” explained New York Instances critic Joseph Giovannini in his review of the launch. “The chairs may well have an intentional bluntness, but they are also very subtle.”

9 of the chair styles were put into production by Knoll right after the launch, in a assortment of colours and finishes that enabled 183 variations.

Art Deco Chair by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown Artwork Deco chair

“We’re not creating the best chair or chairs, but a approach that can involve a lot of variations.” Venturi informed the New York Instances at the launch. “It is the way Common Motors can get so a lot of variations from the normal Buick, Chevrolet and Oldsmobile versions. Standardisation in our case offers us richness and variety, not the universal chair.”

The most distinctive pattern additional to the types was the Grandmother print. Venturi and Scott Brown combined the repeat of a tablecloth belonging to American architect Frederic Schwartz’s grandmother with a flecked black and white motif generally identified on the front of college notebooks.

Described by Scott Brown as a “mixed metaphor”, this pattern was laminated onto the two curved plywood surfaces of the chair.

“That [the chair] is really expressing the limits of its material, plastic laminate, is component of the joke,” explained Lange. “Why need to birch plywood and aluminium have all the entertaining?”

In the Modernist tradition, the pair chose materials that would enable the chairs to be mass made at lower cost. The aim was to make the types available to a wide selection of men and women. But apparently Knoll had other concepts.

Sheraton Chair by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown Sheraton chair

“Knoll, it turned out, was not going to use it in housing for seating the poor,” stated Scott Brown. “They had been making use of it as starchitecture, to allow it rub off on all their other things. And if they’d advised us what they truly needed was light-weight furnishings that could be stacked and that could have two diverse colours on it, dependent on the taste of the client who bought it, we would have accomplished an fully diverse design and style. But they didn’t say any of people items.”

The organization began making the chairs in 1984 and featured the designs in a catalogue as element of a marketing workout.

“They published it as though it were an arcane guide of modern verse, or some thing to lend prestige to their publishing home, but not prepared to sell and we were extremely disappointed at that,” mentioned Scott Brown.


Connected story: Denise Scott Brown demands Pritzker recognition


At the time, all of the credit score for the chairs was offered to Venturi and, in spite of Scott Brown’s requests, Knoll nonetheless does not recognise her contribution to the undertaking – a recurring concern for the architect.

In 2013, she asked to be retrospectively acknowledged for her role in her husband’s perform, which earned him the 1991 Pritzker Prize. A petition supporting her bid was signed by Zaha Hadid, Farshid Moussavi and Hani Rashid – and Venturi himself backed the campaign – but it was rejected by the jury for the prestigious architecture award.

Gothic Revival Chair by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown Gothic Revival chair

Knoll stopped producing the chairs in 1990, but they swiftly grew to become collectible products. The Queen Anne now features in the long lasting collections of institutions including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern day Artwork, and recently featured in the latter’s Creating Modern Women exhibition, which explored how ladies shaped 20th-century design and style.

“The significance of [the Queen Anne] chair is most apparent when you place it in a lineup of renowned architect chairs,” explained Lange. “The pastel colours, the pattern, the blobby curves – a needle-skip in the parade of cheek-sucking, truth-to-resources, lightweight, legless chairs.”

“It gave furnishings style at the time a significantly-essential injection of colour and pattern,” extra Juliet Kinchin, curator at MoMA’s architecture and layout department. “It was also about hunting at the overlooked, taking inspiration from one particular of your granny’s textiles, a fuddy-duddy old chair, printed plastics, and re-imagining their appeal for a contemporary audience.”

“The design and style also embodies the duo’s collaborative technique to each task, nevertheless large or small.”

Photograph is by Graydon Wood and courtesy of VSBA, unless of course specified otherwise.

Dezeen

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