A cantilevered frame chair is next up in our Art Deco Centenary series. Developed by German-American designer Kem Weber, the self-assembly Airline chair laid the foundations for the flat-pack era.
In 1935, decades before IKEA, California-based Weber designed a chair that could be packaged in a thin box and assembled by customers at home without specialist tools.
Its wooden frame primarily consisted of three parts – two side pieces shaped like a lower-case E, which formed the legs and arms, and a moulded plywood seat that joined them together.
The design featured prominently in Weber’s 1939 interior for the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, north of Hollywood, but it never went into mainstream production.
The concept of self-assembly was so alien at the time that Weber couldn’t find a manufacturer to license the design. Efforts to produce it himself, through his Air Line Furniture Company, yielded little reward either.
It could now be described as one of the most defining designs of the art deco style, particularly the offshoot known as streamline moderne, which embraced modern manufacturing techniques.
“Weber’s furniture designs of the late 1930s spoke in the language of a new optimism,” wrote Christopher Long in his 2014 monograph, Kem Weber, Designer and Architect.
“It was a confidence in a gleaming and comfortable future – a better America, divorced both from the past and from European influence. The designs were his statement of independence, of his attempt to stake out a separate terrain for American culture and American life.”
The Airline chair was a turning point in Weber’s career.
Born in Berlin in 1889, as Karl Emanuel Martin Weber, the designer moved to the US by accident after a trip to San Francisco in 2014 coincided with the outbreak of the first world war.
Kem, as he chose to be known from then onwards, made a name for himself as head of design for California-based furniture company Barker Brothers, where he worked from 1921 to 1927.
The US market for contemporary design grew following the popularity of the 1925 Paris exposition – the high point of the art deco style – leading to a series of important private commissions for Weber.
His greatest celebration of the art deco aesthetic was in the interior of Bissinger Residence in San Francisco, a project that epitomised the smooth linearity of streamline moderne.
Completed in 1929, it included a distinctive club chair framed by slender pieces of bent, lacquered wood.
The onset of the Great Depression led to a change of direction, leading Weber to explore designs that could be manufactured at a lower cost.
First came his Bentlock collection, a range of furniture featuring a “self-locking woodcorner” – a novel type of joint that allowed for a more simplified assembly.
The Airline was an evolution of the cantilevered Bentlock lounge chair, returning to a traditional mortise-and-tenon joint to allow for a more streamlined frame.
The chair was designed to bend with the sitter, creating a gentle bounce up and down, and could be adjusted from an upright to a partially reclining position.
Its simple assembly involved sliding two rods between two sets of self-tightening hooks.
Production of the Airline stalled early on due to a lack of interest and might have been forgotten had Weber not won the career-defining Walt Disney Studios commission.
He had over 200 of these chairs manufactured for the complex, where they furnished the projection room and animators’ offices.
Weber’s work became more closely aligned with the modernist style from the late 1930s onwards, embracing the tubular steel pioneered by Bauhaus designer Marcel Breuer.
But the Airline remains his best-known design. Marrying the principles of decorative arts with the practicalities of mass production, it laid the path that IKEA later followed.
Art Deco Centenary
This article is part of Dezeen’s Art Deco Centenary series, which explores art deco architecture and design 100 years on from the “arts décoratifs” exposition in Paris that later gave the style its name.
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