Armchair
The Swiss-born architect and designer William Edmund Lescaze is remembered as one of the earliest proponents of the International Style in the United States. Lescaze studied architecture at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Zurich before immigrating to the United States in 1920. His prolific career spanned five decades, and he was recognized as a pioneer of modern architecture in his own time. His architectural firm, Howe & Lescaze (active 1929–35), designed the first International Style skyscraper, the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (PSFS) building, completed in 1932.1 Lescaze was also one of the first American designers to use tubular steel in furniture design. His designs for tubular-steel chairs with upholstered cushions were included throughout the interior of the PSFS building. The chair in the Museum’s collection is a variation of one of those designs.2 Lescaze used this particular chair type, which he designed in 1931, in at least a couple of other interior projects from that year besides the PSFS building, including the Hattie Carnegie store in New York and in the dining room of his own home. However, each of these versions varies slightly from the example in the Museum’s collection, by the thickness of the cushions, the height of the backrest, the upholstery material, or the size or material used for the armrests.3
The Museum’s example of Lescaze’s tubular-steel chair design appears to be a slightly later version made for the experimental home commissioned in 1936 by Alfred Loomis, a wealthy investment banker and amateur scientist. Loomis invited Lescaze to collaborate with him on a conceptual design to test theories of humidity control, heating and cooling, and soundproofing. Completed in 1939 in the upscale New York resort town of Tuxedo Park, the experimental house comprised two separate structures: a wood-framed building with plaster walls and glass windows and a secondary structure composed of steel, brick, and glass that fully encased the wood-framed house. This effectively created a house within a house. A two-foot gap separated the parallel walls along the home’s perimeter, encasing the house in a bubble of climatized air.4 Lescaze fully designed the interior of the home, including the furniture. The large, open-concept living and dining room area featured a built-in banquette and two tables that could be combined to accommodate larger dining parties. A photo of the Loomis home shows three chairs in the dining area that appear to be identical to the one in the Museum’s collection.5 This armchair is a suburb example of Lescaze’s tubular-steel furniture and is likely derived from Lescaze’s most experimental architectural project. Another extant example from this set was sold at auction in 2016.6 —Sarah Marie Horne
Notes
1. In 1939 Howe & Lescaze was awarded the gold medal of the Philadelphia Chapter of the AIA for the PSFS building, and in 1969 the building received the Building of the Century Award from that chapter.
2. A basic drawing of the chair by Lescaze is labeled “drawing 1062” and dated January 29, 1931; revised April 2, 1931. Lorraine Welling Lanmon, William Lescaze, Architect (Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, 1987), 171, 173.
3. It was previously believed that the Museum’s chair came from the Hattie Carnegie retail store in New York that Lescaze had designed with his partner George Howe in 1931. However, further research revealed that the Carnegie chairs featured longer armrests that were made of wood, rather than leather. Additionally, the Carnegie chairs appear to be upholstered in a woven textile instead of leather. This is consistent with the chairs from Lescaze’s own dining room, which were upholstered in corduroy. Joseph Aronson, The Book of Furniture and Decoration: Period and Modern (London: Crown Publishing, 1941), unpaginated.
4. The experimental house was constructed near Loomis’s famous Tuxedo Park laboratory where he invited the world’s most renowned scientists to work in his state-of-the-art facility. Lanmon, William Lescaze, Architect, 115–16.
5. As pictured in Marilyn F. Friedman, Making America Modern: Interior Design in the 1930s (New York: Baurer and dean Publishers, 2018), 199; William Lescaze Papers, Syracuse University Libraries, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University.
6. Phillips, Design Auction, New York, June 9, 2017, lot 36.