American furniture manufacturer Steelcase and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation have released two collections of furniture based on pieces from the American architect’s late residential projects.
The two collections were derived from designs within the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s (FLWF) archive.
Called Rockford and Galesburg, the collections were based on furniture seen throughout Wright’s oeuvre but directly reference pieces in Laurent house and his series of Usonian homes in Galesburg, Michigan.
Steelcase, which manufactured some of Wright’s furniture during his lifetime, opted to select later designs because of their “accessibility” and reproducibility and worked through thousands of archival designs to find ones for a residential line of furniture.
The Rockford collection features armchairs and a small table with nesting stools.
The armchair was used in multiple settings and featured in Wright’s own office. However the team based the new chair on one made for the Laurent house – a project Wright carried out for a mobility-impaired veteran and his wife.
“Wright wanted to focus on capability and not disability [for the design]”, FLWF president Stuart Graff told Dezeen. “It was an instance of compassionate design.”
The chairs are slung low to the ground with short, solid arms so that users can easily lift themselves out of it. The oak frame’s dowels are prowed to the base and the legs taper.
Meanwhile, the small table is made of plywood and has beveled edges and a triangular top.
The originals were made of hardwoods, but Steelcase applied Wright’s fascination with industrial plywood for consumer settings. It aimed to change the designs while still adhering to Wright’s material choices.
“The original furniture was created in hardwood, and it was adapted at Taliesin West to be this chunky Redwood furniture,” said Graff.
“But as we were working with Steelcase on this, we started to draw on the fact that Wright in this period, doing what he does so often in his career, is taking an industrial material, in this case plywood, and adapting it for domestic use,” he continued.
“He wants to show you how the plywood is constructed and turn what might have been considered to be this raw material of default into a feature by making it the hallmark of the design itself.”
The Galesburg collection is an elaboration of the built-in banquet seating that Wright installed in a number of houses.
It includes arm chairs and a sofa with upholstery that cantilevers over a wooden base with bull nose edges. The team utilized the geometric, single-pane character of Wright’s architectural projects and applied them to a redesigned vision of the chair.
The original chair had “winglets” on the arms that made the chair more delicate, so the team decided to make the arms more substantial and add welts to the fabric that pay homage to Wright’s architectural forms as well as the original chair arms.
“We wanted to see a new design inspired by Wright’s ideas,” said Graff.
The welts run horizontally around the sides of the chairs and sofa, and also up the middle of the sofa at the cushion break to create three distinct seating areas.
The sofa also includes an ottoman that can be attached to create a chaise lounge on either side.
“You have this one unifying element that wraps around and this other unifying element that’s vertical – there’s there’s subtle details, but we know that that’s what makes great design, and that’s what Wright is using to create his great design.”
All of the furniture is available to consumers with a variety of textiles supplied by Designtex.
This is the second major collaboration between Steelcase and FLWF. Last year, they launched a line of office furniture based on Wright’s design for the SC Johnson Administration building, which Dezeen readers named the best furniture design of 2023.
