Butterfly Chair
A
tribute to the original design of Knoll: the 80th anniversary edition of the
Butterfly chair.
The year 1938 was a prolific one in the history of
design, marked among many other things, by the founding of Knoll and the
creation of a special chair. This chair was later chosen by Hans Knoll to
feature in the company’s catalogue from 1947 to 1951, where it garnered immense
success. Thanks in part to Knoll’s foresight, the piece went on to become a
true icon in the history of design and is best known as the Butterfly.
The Butterfly project spans the eras as only an
evergreen can. From its inception, its story has been one of transformation,
adaptability and evolution - characteristics intrinsic to our time. Precisely
for this reason, it symbolises the everlasting modernity of which Knoll has
been a spokesman for about for 80 years.
Yet to fully understand its importance, we need to
take a step backwards.
It was 1937 when three young Spanish-speaking
architects met in Paris: the first, Antonio Bonet, hailed from Barcelona, while
the other two, Juan Kurchan and Jorge Ferrari-Hardoy, were from Buenos Aires. They
were bright and talented, attributes that granted them access to the then most
sought-after address in the world of architecture: number 5, Rue de Sévres: the
studio of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, already better known as Le Corbusier. The
three architects spent a year studying under the Master, absorbing the very
best elements of his work. When they arrived, Corbu had already published his
trilogy on Architecture, Decorative Art and Urbanism, had been rejected and
then restored to glory with his Esprit Nouveau and had worked with Charlotte
Perriand for over ten years to create furnishings that would become significant
milestones in the history of design. It is certain that, either before or
during their apprenticeship, the three architects would have read L’Art
Décoratifs d’Aujourd’hui, in which Le Corbusier demolished the idea of
decorative art in favour of modern design. In his book, the architect discusses
new design, from furniture and technical objects to mass-produced industrial
products and solutions conceived in military contexts that could be transferred
to the domestic setting. It is no surprise that, on their return to Argentina,
the three young hopefuls decided to continue down the road the Master had shown
them. They founded Grupo Austral, a design collective poised to investigate the
new horizons of Argentinian architecture and urbanism (so much so that
Ferrari-Hardoy would go on to work on the new urban plan of Buenos Aires with
Le Corbusier himself). In this the trio were blessed with formidable intuition,
redesigning a classic military piece of furniture: the “Tripolina”. A light and
collapsible armchair, the chair had a wooden frame and metal joints which
formed the base for a canvas or leather cover. It is thought to have been
designed by Joseph B. Fenby in 1877 for the British Army, who then sold the
patent in Italy and the United States. The chair was presented for the first
time at the International Fair of Saint Louis in 1904 by the firm Gold Medal in
Wisconsin. The Tripolina is simple and practical, conceived for military
purposes and their sudden changes of location and transportation. In fact,
thanks to the canvas, the design combines traditionally separate parts such as
the seat and the backrest into a single element, and the chair can be folded
and easily stored in a practical case with a shoulder strap.
The three architects studied its potential and
redesigned it, enhancing its features to give it pride of place in the new
domestic setting. They were some of the very first architects to venture into
“redesign”, a practice that would later catapult countless designers to fame
and generate numerous iconic pieces of furniture. They focused particularly on
structure, taking inspiration from the international trend for tubular metal,
which in the previous decade had characterised the furniture of the rationalist
movement, the highly modern machine-manufactured style championed by the great
Corbu himself.
The wooden frame with metal joints - too complex for
industrialised mass-production - was replaced by two curved metal elements to
create a single, seamless loop. The new version lost the flexibility of the
original design but gained decidedly more interesting characteristics. The
shape of the seat maintained its simplicity yet became cleaner and more
defined, while the structure is linear, pure and continuous like a Möbius band.
But, above all, it succeeded in condensing the advantages of two styles into
one. It is versatile, light and stackable like a chair, but also comfortable
and wide like an armchair. It is no surprise that the level of comfort it
offers brings to mind a hammock, the traditional Latin American chair that
forms a cocoon-like womb while offering the lightness and cleanliness of a
simple hanging canvas.
Some of the most prominent supporters of the Butterfly
include Edgar Kaufmann Junior, an architect who was introduced to the great
classics from birth, being as he was the son of the businessman who
commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to create the legendary Fallingwater (the House
on the Waterfall) and Richard Neutra to design one of his most striking
Californian villas. Kaufmann Jnr's passion for the piece was such that in 1940
he ordered the armchair be included in the permanent collections of the MoMA in
New York, for which he was a consultant. In 1947 Hans Knoll acquired the rights
to the design and successfully produced it as Model no. 198 for four years.
The number of names by which it is known - BFK, the
Argentina, the African, the Hardoy Chair or, more commonly, the Butterfly, are
second only to the countless attempts to imitate it. The Chair’s design
preceded by almost thirty years the radical research into non-conventional and
vernacular chairs, which at the same time embodied some of the greatest
classics of the modernist movement. The Butterfly invented a new way of
sitting, freeing its users from social formalisms and enabling them to engage
in a new form of conviviality that would later form the basis for the
contemporary furniture developed from the 1950s onwards, a style championed by
American design.
Today, the Butterfly is still recognised as a classic
of modernity that enjoys universal success. It is a symbol of lightness and
liberty yet offers an elegance that succeeds in being informal and refined at
the same time.