I was on Pinterest (Need I say more?) and followed several links back to an Australian site called Tongue & Groove Interiors. It had an interesting vintage archive section of chairs by Australian designers. I couldn't help but notice similarities between some of the pieces and those of other mid-century designers from around the world. Again, it led to questions of who copied whom, and more research ensued.
Take for example this 1949 chair, attributed by Tongue & Groove to the Australian designer Douglas Snelling. Adding arms and a stretcher doesn't really disguise that it's almost identical to the lounge chair designed by Jens Risom in 1941.
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| Douglas Snelling lounge chair, 1949 tongueandgroove.com.au |
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| Jens Risom lounge chair, 1941 fourspace.com |
Then there's the Kone chair by Roger McLay which Tongue & Groove says was designed in 1947. The Museum of Modern Art in New York says the side chair by Donald Knorr was designed for Knoll in 1948, and it this is substantiated by its appearance in the catalog for "Prize Designs for Modern Furniture," an exhibition at the MoMA in 1948. The competition was juried by Rene d'Harnoncourt, Hugh Lawson and Mies van der Rohe, among others, and Knorr's design won first prize. This one may be too close to call, but if Tongue & Groove's date is correct, McLay may have won by a nose.
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| Kone chair by Roger McLay, 1949 duckfat.com.au |
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| Side chair for Knoll by Donald Knorr, 1949 moma.org |
And how about the similarities between the R160 Contour chair by Australian Grant Featherston and the Papa Bear chair by Hans Wegner. Both designed in 1951, they don't share as many common features as the Risom and Snelling lounge chairs, but it's clear they share some DNA. Maybe Wegner and Featherston were pen pals?
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| R160 Contour chair by Grant Featherston, 1951 shapiro.com.au |
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| Papa Bear chair by Hans Wegner, 1951 |
The 1969 Stem chair by Grant Featherston looks like the offspring of a 1956 Eero Saarinen Tulip chair and a 1958 Verner Panton Cone chair...one parent's feet and the other's torso. The influence is undeniable.
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| Grant Featherston's Stem chair, 1969 powerhousemuseum.com |
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| Tulip chairs for Knoll by Eero Saarinen, 1956 knoll.com |
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| Vitra Cone chair by Verner Panton stylepark.com |
Australian Grant Featherston designed the Scape chair in 1960. Three years later Hans Wegner made drastic changes to his 1948 shell chair design, squaring the back and putting a much more noticeable upswing on the seat. The 1963 version of Wegner's shell chair was too much like Featherston's to have been mere coincidence.
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| Grant Featherston's Scape chair, 1960 powerhousemuseum.com |
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| Hans Wegner's three-legged shell chair, 1963 egodesign.ca |
In the years before computers connected every point on the globe, designers no doubt still kept up with what other designers were doing by reading trade magazines and attending exhibitions around the world. The lack of international patent laws made it possible to "borrow" the intellectual property of others, often without the average consumer in their own countries having any way of knowing. I continue to be amazed when I research the origins of well-known pieces, as so often the ideas behind their design were not as original as I believed.
