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His 40/4 chair, of which you can stack 40 in a four-foot-high space, has sold in the multimillions. They're in the MoMA. And every space-tight place from church basements to submarines has a pile of them tucked away, ready to deploy.Rowland designed the chairs largely on his own time in the late 1950s, but companies were not interested and his design lay fallow for eight years. Then a big-name architecture firm suddenly needed 17,000 chairs for a massive project at the University of Chicago and the rest, as they say, is history. Read the full story in Rowland's NY Times obituary.At some point in your life, maybe in a lecture hall or a church basement, chances are you've sat in a masterpiece of mid-20th century design — the "GF 40/4 Chair," so-called because a stack of 40 of chairs takes up just 4 feet of vertical space.Made of steel and coated with chrome and vinyl, the GF 40/4 is thin but durable, graceful but comfortable. At first, though, skeptical manufacturers kept it out of production.
Then, in 1964, production took off when the big architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill ordered 17,000 of the chairs for its futuristic University of Illinois at Chicago Circle campus (now the University of Illinois at Chicago). The chair won awards for its industrial designer, David Rowland. Millions have been sold worldwide.That vignette, recounted in "The Modern Chair," a tasty morsel of an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, reveals why architecture and design ought to be viewed together rather than in separate silos. The total environment is what shapes us, not buildings over here and furnishings over there. In the fall of 2017, the Art Institute will expand significantly on that idea. Most of a now-closed suite of galleries in the Renzo Piano-designed Modern Wing will be reopened to showcase what the museum is billing as its first permanent installation of 20th and 21st century architecture and design.Expect to see "greatest hits," including works by familiar figures such as Louis Sullivan and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Also shown will be subjects that come under the heading of "quirky" or "under-appreciated," such as French architect and designer Charlotte Perriand, who collaborated with the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier on a famous chaise longue that appears in "The Modern Chair." The new installation is likely to cover the history of skyscrapers (requiring a dip into the 1880s when the first tall office buildings rose in Chicago), design for wartime, the rethinking of the workplace and the digital age. "The big themes are about ... those moments where design meets life and starts to inform the way we do things," said Zoe Ryan, the museum's chief architecture and design curator.For the public, the installation should offer a fresh chance to encounter the museum's permanent collection, which is particularly strong in holdings from Chicago and contains an estimated 250,000 objects, 95 percent of them architectural drawings. Many are stored in the museum's vaults. Others are held in off-site climate-controlled art storage facilities.
Only a tiny fraction are on view. The installation also may create benefits for potential donors, who would prefer to see their gifts displayed rather than locked in vaults. "People want to gift us things; they want to see them on view," Ryan said.Although the installation is characterized as permanent, certain aspects of it will be ever-shifting. Partly, that's because light-sensitive architectural drawings are displayed only for three months. It's also because scholars are constantly re-evaluating the merits of designers; in that spirit, Ryan and her colleagues are surveying the permanent collection to discern strengths, weaknesses and new perspectives on the past."I don't want it to be a static presentation," Ryan said of the installation. "History is always being rewritten."When the installation opens, it will occupy 5,000 square feet of the Modern Wing's second-floor architecture galleries. The remaining 3,000 square feet will be devoted to rotating exhibitions. Big shows, such as last year's survey of works by the London architect David Adjaye, will move to Regenstein Hall in the neighboring Rice Building.In anticipation of the new display, the museum on Dec. 17 will open a three-part show that has the working title "Design Episodes: Form, Style, Language."
It will cover the emergence of postmodern design, contemporary graphic design and an expanded version of "The Modern Chair." Even in current modest form, though, the chair show is worth a visit. In a single room, we encounter 12 chairs by an array of masters, among them American designers Charles and Ray Eames, Italian-born American designer Harry Bertoia, Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, American architect Eero Saarinen, and Mies and Le Corbusier. We see how they used materials new and old, and took advantage of mass production, to liberate the chair from what Saarinen, famous for his tulip-shaped side chair, called "the slum" of traditional four-legged furniture.And though we can't sit in the chairs, we can sense how well — or not — their creators considered the comfort and spirits of the people using them.The key example is Aalto's armchair of bent wood, commissioned for the Paimio tuberculosis sanatorium in southwest Finland in the 1930s. Made of warm birch and plywood instead of cold, tubular steel, the chair was designed with an angled back, meant to help people suffering from tuberculosis breathe more easily.