Denise Scott Brown (&Robert Venturi)- Queen Anne Side Chair (1983)

 The design of the Queen Anne chair embodies the design duo – Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s – collaborative approach, based on the furniture style developed during and after the reign of the British monarch from 1702 to 1714.

The significance of the Queen Anne chair is most obvious when you put it in a line-up of famous architect chairs. Although given the same visual flattening treatment, making the designs look like they had been squeezed through a mangle, the carved shapes and flourishes used to identify each of these styles all remained apparent in the silhouettes.

The most distinctive pattern added to the designs was the Grandmother print. Scott Brown and Venturi combined the repeat of a tablecloth, belonging to American architect Frederic Schwartz’s grandmother with a flecked black and white motif, commonly found on the front of school notebooks.

The Queen Anne chair gave furniture design at the time a much-needed injection of colour and pattern. In a way, it was also about looking at the overlooked, taking inspiration from one of your granny’s textiles, a fuddy-duddy old chair, printed plastics, and re-imagining their appeal for a contemporary audience.

Author: Anna Marie Fisker

Photo: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/3238