Philippe Stark – Lounge Chair, Serie Lang (1986)
The chair is designed by Philippe Stark in 1986 as part of a series called Lang, which also includes dining tables and dining chairs to the famous Royalton Hotel in New York. Today Driade in Italy produces the chair.
The chair is made of a tubular steel shell with spring units, upholstered with fixed leather and one large cast polished aluminium leg. From the front, the chair would seem like a classic nineteen-eighties lounge chair, but as you walk around it, a secret reveals itself. Almost like a wasp, it exposes “the sting”, a freestanding long leg that pushes the chair in a dynamically way to stand on its toe. The significant leg makes the chair somehow float between stability and instability, making it almost impossible to remove your eyes from it, as one cannot stop studying this sculptural mix of chair and creature.
The chair is one of Philippe Stark’s first classics. In many ways, it reassembles his career – balancing on the edge of the ingenious and provocative.
I am not having apiphobia, but the obscurity of this chair as a kind of storyteller has a certain wickedness surrounding it, which, for me, makes this chair hard to fall in love with.
Author: Jeppe Heden Christensen
