Proven at his home in Nancy, France.

“My father liked to swing on a chair,” recalls Catherine Prouvé, daughter of the French designer Jean Prouvé. “It’s why he designed one with stronger back legs.” She’s speaking about Prouvé’s Standard chair, first made in 1934, in which two 90-degree bends of tubular steel slot into hollow, folded steel back legs to form a lightweight but sturdy frame for a solid wood seat and back. Plastic Chairs Stacking Chairs

Those robust back legs—often likened to airplane wings—would become a Prouvé hallmark, appearing in tables and architecture. They gave the seat extra strength, since, as Prouvé pointed out, “a chair always breaks at the back joint between the legs and the seat.”

Design Miami founder Craig Robins’s Florida home.

This became a template that Prouvé honed over the years. Seats soon shifted to molded plywood. An all-wood version, the Chaise Tout Bois, was created from 1942 to 1947 due to wartime metal restrictions. And from 1947 to 1953, a flat-packable one was released that could be assembled with simple hardware. By 1950, as steel shortages waned, Prouvé had nearly perfected the design, which he would soon begin calling the Standard.

The revamped seat by Vitra in Bleu Marcoule.

In 1951, Prouvé’s factory in Maxéville, France, produced a run of 1,000. The chairs fit easily into Prouvé’s other projects—schools, public facilities, and domestic spaces. In his own home in Nancy, France, they pulled up to dining tables and desks alike. But production was sporadic—Galerie Steph Simon in Paris made them in spurts in the 1960s and ’80s—before Vitra got involved in 2000.

 The seat in Liev Schreiber’s Noho bath, by Ashe Leandro.

“He made the chair more and more simple—in the look and in the production,” explains Stine Liv Buur, the design manager classics at Vitra, which holds more than seven versions of the Standard in its collection. This year Vitra, which still produces the chair (they launched a plastic version, from $835, in 2013), unveils it in an expanded range of colors.

Meanwhile, Prouvé’s historic Standards have become a trophy chair for collectors—Design Miami founder Craig Robins uses one in his library in Florida; at design dealer Hugues Magen’s Tribeca apartment (page 118) they surround the breakfast table. A demountable Standard from 1952 fetched $44,000 at Wright in 2017. Buur explains: “The rare, historical versions have now been lifted up to art pieces.” vitra.com

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By Alia How Are You

By Alia How Are You

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