Saturday 14 July 2012

Stackable Chairs

Stackable Chairs
Rowland was born on February 12, 1924 in Los Angeles. An only child, his mother was a violinist while his father was an artist who served as art director of the Haggin Museum inStockton, California. He served in the European Theater of Operations with the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. After completing his military service, Rowland earned his undergraduate degree in 1949 from Principia College and was awarded a master's degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art.[1]
He moved to Manhattan, where he found work with the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes. Working on his own in a low-rent apartment in Upper Manhattan, he went through dozens of designs and prototypes of a chair that could be stored in a minimum of space.[1] By 1951, Rowland demonstrated a model of the chair with seating surfaces only one quarter of an inch thick, described by The Christian Science Monitor as a "transparent chair".[2] He finally created a design for a replacement for the folding chair that he first called the "40 in 4 chair", a wire-framed chair with a sculpted seat and back that got its name from the ability to nest 40 of the chairs in a stack four feet high which would occupy 20 cubic feet (0.57 m3) of space. It took eight years before he was finally able to find a buyer interested in purchasing the chair, when Skidmore, Owings and Merrill ordered 17,000 of the chairs on behalf of the University of Chicago, selling a steel and plastic version of the chair for $16 each.
Stackable Chairs
Stackable Chairs
Stackable Chairs
Stackable Chairs
Stackable Chairs
Stackable Chairs
Stackable Chairs
Stackable Chairs
Stackable Chairs

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