This chair just sold for $3.7M — and it was 'never really intended to be comfortable'
Marc Newson's Lockheed Lounge has been called the original "blobject" and featured in an article called "Furniture Without Pity." Its own designer has conceded "it was never really intended to be comfortable," and when he produced a dozen or so of the chairs in the 1980s, the BBC said, he couldn't get rid of them. They sold in the low four figures apiece at the time.
Now No. 10 in an edition of 10 has just sold at London's Phillips auction house for $3.7 million, the Telegraph reports — an all-time world-record price for an object by a living designer. The winning bidder is anonymous.
It's called Lockheed in a nod to its airplane-like riveted cladding, but that wasn't the original intent. The image Newson had in mind was one liquid "globule of mercury," he told the BBC two decades after that first groundbreaking work. (The video interview is on YouTube; the section on the Lockheed Lounge starts about 3 minutes and 25 seconds in.) Though the chair looks industrial, Newson's process was actually a laborious effort by hand to achieve such curves. It's made of carved foam sheathed in aluminum plates, with rubber feet.
Why does this piece command such a price?
When you look at the chair, "you can see where the design has come from and where it’s going in the future," Alexander Payne, Phillips' design director, tells the Telegraph. "You can see silhouettes and lines there from anything from the Apple Watch to new cars that are being designed today, jets, television screens and day-to-day objects."
Not entirely coincidentally, Newson was recently hired by Apple and is thought to have had a hand in designing the Apple Watch.
The chair also featured in Madonna's 1993 video "Rain."
Click here or on a photo for a slideshow of Newson's Lockheed Lounge.
(h/t Curbed)
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