Welcome to Furniture Friday! Today, we explore Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic design legacy through two new collections from Steelcase, created in collaboration with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. The Rockford and Galesburg collections breathe new life into Wright’s mid-century Usonian aesthetics, blending historical elegance with modern functionality to suit today’s lifestyles.
Designer: Steelcase + Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright’s philosophy of “organic architecture” emphasized the integration of human habitats with their environment. This principle is beautifully manifested in the Rockford and Galesburg collections, which draw directly from Wright’s archival designs. These collections honor their historical roots while offering pieces that meet modern needs.
The Rockford Collection is inspired by Wright’s Laurent house, a project designed for a disabled veteran. The collection features a lounge chair that maintains the original’s focus on accessibility but updates it with modern materials such as plywood. Accompanying the chair are movable seating and polygonal tables designed to enhance interaction and serve practical daily use.
Continuing this theme, the Galesburg Collection transforms the built-in banquettes of Wright’s Usonian homes into standalone pieces suitable for modern settings. The collection includes sofas, sectionals, and lounge chairs characterized by clean lines and geometric shapes, reflecting Wright’s architectural finesse. These pieces merge historical inspiration with contemporary needs, making them perfect for home and office environments.
A key element of both collections is using plywood, a material Wright favored for its versatility. In these designs, plywood is celebrated as a main feature, highlighting its durability and aesthetic appeal. The modern, understated upholstery complements the wooden structures, enhancing the overall experience and focusing on quality craftsmanship.
The collaboration between Steelcase and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation goes beyond a typical business partnership. It actively engages with historical contexts, aiming to adapt Wright’s innovative designs to contemporary needs. This partnership began with Wright’s designs for the SC Johnson Administration Building 80 years ago and continues to ensure his architectural philosophies remain influential in today’s spaces.
By introducing Wright’s timeless designs into everyday environments, Steelcase honors his architectural legacy while demonstrating that thoughtful design continues to enhance human experiences and environments. These collections show that great design effectively bridges historical heritage with modern functionality, impacting how we live and work today.
The post New Steelcase Furniture Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Iconic Designs first appeared on Yanko Design.
A winner of the iF Gold Award, the LessThanFive chair gets its name from the fact that it weighs less than 5 pounds. Made entirely from carbon-fiber, the chair was a collaborative project between Michael Young and Coalesse, a Steelcase brand. The chair explores carbon fiber as a material for furniture by pushing the boundaries of what the material can do. The chair’s form is so elegantly slim that it can only be made out of carbon fiber (any other material would cause it to buckle), and even though it weighs less than 5 lbs, it can hold a stunning 300lbs of weight!
The Hacker Watch encapsulates Young’s east-meets-west approach rather perfectly. “ODM was a local brand and at the time had not worked with an international designer at this level. Paul So, the CEO, is a great thinker and had predicted world timepiece recession, due to smartphones, long before they became household items”, says Young. The watch was designed as a result of this approach, and combined an iconic design along with an affordable price, making the watch instantly desirable, even in an age where people just read the time on their smartphone. The watch was designed and manufactured in 2011, when the smartphone movement had just picked up pace.
The MY Collection first premiered at Gallery ALL in LA and Beijing, and comprised a chair, a side table, a writing desk, a round coffee table, a console, and a lounge chair. The unusually designed pieces featured polished stainless steel honeycomb frames, inlaid with white enamel surfaces. Each piece consisted of a cluster of hollow metal extrusions capped at each end and covered with enamel, making the furniture look less like conventional home decor and more like eye-catching jewelry. “A while back, I had worked with cloisonné in Northern China and began to look at how patterns and colors came together and how metal could be shaped to create divisions of form”, Michael mentions. “Some of my earlier attempts were inspired by oil on water and the natural patterns generated by this when taken in a snapshot. For Gallery ALL, we looked at these in a new way by self-generating forms created by the computer, and then we extracted the patterns in two-dimensional slices.”
Initially produced to share some of the Mini’s mechanical parts, but with a more rugged body shell to give it a life intended for the beach, the Moke holds its own as a historic and cult car with a rich 50-year history that was sadly put out of production in 1993. However, when Young got an email asking if he would work on redesigning a Moke reissue, he called it a “call of duty as a Moke Enthusiast”. It was essential to strike an equal balance for the old enthusiast and the new generation of Moke drivers, like himself. After redesigning and reengineering more than 160 new parts the MOKE was brought back, better than ever. “It has the same spirit, the same style and is just as suave as the original Moke”, says Young.
The Template watch hopes to merge the movement and face into one singular piece. It isn’t as much a skeletal watch as it is a work of art that also displays the watch’s fine engineering. Yet another winner of the iF Gold Award, the Template Watch flips the tradition of having a plain watch-face and integrating a transparent exhibition back to showcase the watch’s movement. Instead, the ornately designed watch-face itself lets you peer through and see certain aspects of the watch’s movement. It balances its ‘industrial aesthetic’ with curved edges on the watch-face, that give it a softness to the appearance.
Perhaps one of the most unusual projects in Michael’s body of work, the Oxygen Chair has a strangely relic-esque quality to it… along with an incredibly interesting manufacturing method. The chairs are molded out of aluminum that’s injected into steel casts along with high-temperature gas at immensely high pressures (hence the name Oxygen Chair). The process is somewhat similar to how rocks are formed, and the resulting chair looks less like metal and more like an excavated block of stone with imperfect, porous surfaces that are almost in line with igneous rocks. Finally, to give the furniture its color, it’s coated in a way similar to ceramic glazing, but with absolutely rustic and unusual results. The final chair challenges the archetypes of furniture and craftsmanship, offering a radically experimental manufacturing method that results in chairs fit to be in a museum!
Once again challenging the archetypes of furniture, the Homune Table combines jewelry and furniture design into one absolutely eye-catching final product. The Homune Table’s base comes hand-blown from amber-glass, giving it an almost gem-like appeal that’s accentuated by the geometric design of the base. The honeycomb structure isn’t just an aesthetic detail, but rather gives the table strength too, while the complete glass design really sets it apart as bordering on glass solitaire.
Designed to look less like a fabric rug and more like stained-glass art, the Voronic & Tesselation Rugs is a result of a long-time partnership between Young and rug-company Christopher Farr. The use of voronoi patterns gives the rug an aesthetic that’s a massive deviation from the oriental and occidental rug styles, or even contemporary rugs, that are either rectangular or circular in shape. ‘Voronic’, a hand-knotted rug, and ‘Tessellation’, a hand-tufted version are both designs configured through Young experimenting with a voronoi pattern. This motif is found in nature – where it is perhaps most instantly recognizable as the pattern of a giraffe’s skin, or even in the cellular patterns found on leaves. With various points of shape and color, this rug is infinitely customizable, allowing it to expand as a series, or even be tailor-made to certain spaces/rooms/interior styles.
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