Chair of the Day: Kong Bar Stool
When will Philippe Starck get a new idea? Enough with the Ghost Chair already! Here is his Kong bar stool for Emeco.
Funny story! At last year’s Salone, I met with one of the heads of Emeco. They had just launched Ettore Sottsass’s gorgeous Nine-O Collection for them. The Emeco guy told me that when Philippe saw it (and compared it to one he’d already done for Emeco) Starck promised he’d¬† put real effort into his next project for them.
Huh! Say What? Not. I guess he forgot. Call it a French Chair FAIL.
I think Phil needs to get off his sofas and start designing again. How about you?
12 Responses to “Chair of the Day: Kong Bar Stool”
Avatars are randomly assigned unless you get your own
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Posted by Joe Posch on May 1st, 2009 at 5:27 pm
The one-arm version is kind of interesting, although it is a total Louis Ghost variation. Kind of a nice one though.
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Posted by Leon on May 2nd, 2009 at 12:34 am
I wasn’t a fan of the Louis Ghost chair at all, nor much that Starck does for that matter, so a shiny long-legged and basically ill-proportioned version looks like landfill waiting to happen. Come on Philippe…it’s a chair, how hard can it be? Getting an intern to CTRL + T the legs in Photoshop doesn’t constitute a new design. From this angle it looks like a stick figure putting its fingers into its ears.
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Posted by Dan Fogelson on May 7th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Thanks for the comments. Formally, Kong does not vary much from the Kartell projects. From a production/ material point of view it’s interesting though. 24 separate pieces of 80% recycled aluminum are hand formed and welded to create the chair (three for each arm for instance) taking 8 hours. It takes another 8 hours to hand polish each one. It’s an inefficient way to make a chair, but it results in a one-of-a-kind piece Рyou can tell each one is hand made Рmore like making a sculpture than a production chair. Despite the cost, Kong accounts for 10% of our sales Рmarkets include hospitality (80%), retail interior (10%) and residential (10%).
Dan Fogelson
VP Sales and Marketing, Emeco
+1 401 935 7088
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Posted by Jennifer on May 7th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Dan,
I appreciate your taking the time to write a comment. And I appreciate that the chair is a work of art in terms of Emeco’s brilliant ability to manufacture a chair.But, in my opinion, Philippe is coasting. Think of what he could come up with if he rediscovered his youth? If he goes on like this, his name will lose its star appeal and his work will winf up in the 2 for 1 bin.
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Posted by Dan Fogelson on May 8th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Jennifer:
Perhaps.
Who’s work do you find captivating?
Who’s work do you desire?
Who’s work do you think will last?
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Posted by Jennifer on May 9th, 2009 at 8:18 am
Good question. I assume you’re talking about someone living. I like Patricia Urquiola and Constantin Grcic. I like the feminine appeal of Urquiola’s designs, though I don’t love everything she’s done. I like Grcic’s geometric lines. His stool for Plank is a “modern classic”. I think Todd Bracher is someone to watch.
Regarding Starck, I don’t think he’s a bad designer – he’s very gifted. I just think he’s stopped trying. His Kong stool isn’t ugly, it’s boring. We’ve seen him do this before. Conversely, Ettore Sottsass’s chairs for Emeco are truly beautiful. He took the classic navy chair and turned it into something that’s new, but clearly part of Emeco’s lineage. It seems to me there was real thinking going on there.
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Posted by misterarthur on May 9th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
As I understand it, the original Emeco chair was designed to a particular brief – make a very lightweight, nearly indestructible chair for the US Navy. Whoever did the design really understood anatomy – I have two in my office, and when people encounter them for the first time, they are always surprised by how light they are, and how comfortable they are. This Starck version is like adding decorative fiberglass caryatids to a Mies Van Der Rohe town house. It’s just a more ‘decorative’ version (yes, it’s just a ghost chair in aluminum) of the original – that probably does nothing to make it lighter, more durable, or more comfortable.
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Posted by Leon on May 9th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
It’s interesting to hear the back story in regards to the manufacturing process; as a designer it’s important to properly consider how something will be made and not just how it looks. Unfortunately, it seems Starck didn’t. I can appreciate that he specified the recycled aluminum, it gets good green points on paper. But the embodied energy of this thing (the energy required to resource, manufacture, assemble, even ship etc) is off the charts and this is where the green points are the most important. I think labor & energy intensive design is old-school for something like a chair. Good design dictates smart design and smarter engineering and Starck is old enough to know this. If you are going to spend so much time, energy and money, it better be absolutely beautiful.
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Posted by Sandra on May 10th, 2009 at 9:28 am
It would be interesting to hear Starck’s opinion to your comments, I agree with Leon defining designers but as we all know usually designers conceptualize intent. What was he thinking? Immortalizing his design? Dan F. can you give us more insight?
Looking at his proportion form the original Ghost chair I have to say I miss the space portion that separated the back to the seat, originally in a Louis XV.
Proportion change and I felt the balance on the back is lost.
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Posted by Dan Fogelson on May 10th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
This is a great conversation. Here is a little more back story. In 1998 Gregg Buchbinder (then in his early 40′s) bought Emeco from his father who had owned it, along with other furniture manufacturing companies, since 1978. The company was almost out of business- about 19 old guys were making Navy chairs (under a leaky roof), mostly for the US government. Gregg had followed a mini revival for the Navy chair (started by Sottsass in the 1980′s) and thought he could turn the company around by focusing on the “Design” market – just starting to gain traction in the US. Buchbinder met Starck by accident in 1999 in NY and the two became friends. Starck had used Emeco chairs in some of his projects and was working on the Hudson Hotel renovation at the time. He and Gregg decided to modify the Navy chair for the project. The result was the Hudson chair, as Starck describes ‚Äúwashed the detail from the Navy chair‚Äù ‚Äì not necessarily a revolutionary design. I think Hudson is still our best chair ‚Äì its more comfortable than Navy, and the addition of hand polishing makes this a startling use of material. In addition, Hudson shares the same ‚Äúchassis‚Äù as Navy making tooling and development realistic for a little, struggling company. The form is directly from the prototypical Kartell chair, however. The Hudson chair put Emeco on the ‚Äúdeign ‚Äú map and soon other well regarded designers came to us to do projects with them. Besides the designs by Sottsass and Gehry, all our chairs were designed for projects, not on spec. Today, Emeco is 6 times the size the company was in 1998, with about 70 workers, and we export to 30 countries (with about 30% of total as export). We are one of a very few American furniture manufacturers that successfully exports ‚Äì the US is not usually considered for great, international manufacturing and furniture design. Starck comes back to us to make chairs for projects occasionally, and that is what happened with Kong (made for a Chinese restaurant in Paris and added to the product line in 2003).
As far as the environmental impact of Aluminum, the company has always used recycled material in production; it‚Äôs only been recently that this has been newsworthy. The USGBC describes 40% post consumer material as a ‚ÄúGreen‚Äù feature ‚Äì we didn‚Äôt invent this. Until there is a national (international) consensus of what ‚ÄúGreen‚Äù is, this is what we have to go by (and promote). The more important issue for Emeco is that we build chairs that are guaranteed to last for at least 150 years ‚Äì so recycling them is a moot point. The value comes from buying something that you do not have to throw out. Not really scientific and harder to market than “80% recycled aluminum”, but a philosophy I can promote.
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Posted by Jennifer on May 11th, 2009 at 8:32 am
Oops! I accidentally deleted this comment in answer to Dan’s question about designers I like.
It’s from my friend, George Simons, Jr. – a product designer. Here’s what he has to say.
“In ’89, while the head of advanced concepts at Steelcase, I worked with Starck for a week. At the time he was just getting his superstar status. I found him engaging, intelligent, insightful, and an absolute riot to hang out with. Even then, he had about two guys that took scribbles on anything from napkins to business cards, and then turned them into products. He often would not see any progression of the design between the doodle and the works-like and looks-like models. It made him proliferous, famous, rich, but it has also run its course.
I now find his stuff predictable and dull – except the gun lamp. his latest for this years Salone are simply re-dos of his past work.
But, I still like the guy.
Good stuff. Hmmmm.
New guys on the block:
sam hechtAlways Solid:
naoto fukisawa
jasper morrison remains tight
konstantin grcic
lievore, altherr, molina
lissoni
alfredo haberliGetting Tired:
bouroullec brothers are getting tired but their latest chair for vitra is beautiful
jean marie massaoud
marcel wanders
starck
patricia urquiolaReally tired, almost dead (i hope)
RashidFun and always pushing:
bertjan pot is good
richard hutten is fun and solid
maarten baas
tom dixonThis is fun, could go on for a long time. cheers.”
That’s pretty repetitive…. I suppose its OK as a spin-off, but shouldn’t be considered as a brand new line.