The Egg chair
Retro is back, and has been back for a while now, steadily increasing
in its influence on present-day designs, and it doesn’t show any signs
of stopping for the foreseeable future. However this isn’t the only way
retro is present in today’s life, there are also plenty of retro designs
which haven’t been changed since their conception maybe fifty years ago
which started appearing on the market with the benefit of modern
technology and materials. One such example of retro furniture could be
considered a sort of the trademark piece of that particular era, this
being of course the egg chair. Many people will know this from the
seventies when it definitely peaked in popularity, however not many
would know that the egg chair has been around in fact since sometime in
the late fifties. This particular chair was a huge hit thanks to its
unique design characteristic, being built in the shape of an egg, when
you’d be sitting in the chair you wouldn’t be sitting as much as you’d
be surrounded and encased in comfort and a sense of peace and quiet,
almost isolation. The egg chair’s roots come from the bubble chair
which was completely round in shape the egg shape came as a natural
evolution of that shape to better house the human body since we’re not
exactly spherical beings.
The egg chair was designed in 1958 in Denmark for the SAS Radisson Hotel
by Arne Jacobsen and ever since it’s been copied and countless
variations of it produced. Originally it had a steel frame with
customizable fabric upholstery, the original upholstery being red to
match the décor of the hotel. When the concept of the egg chair
crossed the Atlantic, someone in America came up with the idea of
incorporating speakers inside the chair near the person’s ears thus
offering a quite unique and interesting listening experience. This idea
turned out to be a huge hit and despite the fact that the music egg
chairs were rather expensive they still sold well, and became a
trademark of what we now consider to be the retro style of the sixties
and seventies. Despite it being considered quite retro, the egg chair
has become a symbol of enduring design, being in fact constantly used
throughout the decades since then, making appearances in media and
furniture stores. Now with retro being increasingly popular again
there’s no wonder why the egg chair is getting its fair dues but one
must always keep in mind that as opposed to the other designs that are
now re-appearing and are being used as inspiration by modern designers,
the egg chair has always been here, basically unchanged since its 1958
creation for a hotel in Denmark. |
