Design favourites - Butterfly chair
Posted on November 30, 2011 by Li
The "Hardoy" or more commonly named "Butterfly" chair, was designed by Jorge Ferrari-Hardoy, Antonio Bonet and Juan Kurchan in Argentina in 1938. They introduced their new chair of leather and enameled steel at an interior design exhibition in Buenos Aires in 1940, where it was discovered by the Museum of Modern Art. At the request of MoMA design director Edgar Kaufmann Jr., Hardoy sent three pre-production chairs to New York. One is in the MoMA collection and one is at the Frank Lloyd Wright house Fallingwater, but no one knows where the third chair went. Naming the Butterfly as one of the "best efforts of modern chair design," Kaufmann accurately predicted that it would become extremely popular.
Image courtesy: NY Times
Knoll
acquired US production rights of the Hardoy chair in 1947, bringing
international notice and commercial success to the design. A rash of
inferior copies prompted legal action by Knoll in 1950. After losing
thier claim of copyright infringement, Knoll dropped the chair from its
line in 1951. More than five million copies of the chair were estimated
to have been produced by numerous manufacturers during the 1950's alone.
‘Butterfly’ chair dating from the mid century. For sale by Visavu Design, Netherlands.
