Know Your Chairs: The Egg™ Chair

If you're not totally egged-out from yesterday's Easter egg hunt and, if you're anything like me, devouring the last of the Cadbury chocolate eggs, let's take a look at another kind of egg for this installation of Know your Chairs.

Designed by Danish architect and designer Arne Jacobsen for Fritz Hansen, the Egg™ Chair is an iconic piece of mid-century design.

Inspired by the bent plywood designs of Charles and Ray Eames, Jacobsen created this marvel in 1958 for the Radisson SAS Royal Copenhagen Hotel in Denmark when it opened in 1960.

Here we see the Egg™ Chair in the lobby of the SAS Hotel and Arne Jacobsen with a pair of chairs also at the hotel. The curved contours of the chair--like those of its namesake, an actual egg--served to soften the hard angularity of the modernist hotel itself, a contrast that is a hallmark of mid-century design.

Yes, the Egg™ Chair is modern, but because of the dynamic of pairing opposites (see my Design Mantra #1 to the right, "Contrast brings interest!"), the Egg™ can fit nicely with other periods and styles.

The chair is still manufactured today by Fritz Hansen using the same exacting techniques: 1200 hand-sewn stitches go into the making of each Egg™. The photo below from their website obviously contains a typo since the company was founded in 1872, not 1972!

Happy designing!