The 25 Most Defining Pieces of Furniture From the Last 100 Years
The 25 Most Defining Pieces of Furniture From the Last 100 Years (Part 2)
Three designers, a museum curator, an artist and a design-savvy actress convened at The New York Times to make a list of the most enduring and significant objects for living.
By Nick Haramis, Max Berlinger, Rose Courteau, Kate Guadagnino, Max Lakin and Evan Moffitt
6. Gae Aulenti, Table With Wheels, 1980
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Gae Aulenti, photographed in 2006 for T.Credit...
© Ruven Afanador/CPi Syndication
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For her Table With Wheels, Aulenti reimagined a factory trolley’s wooden shelf with a thick sheet of beveled glass.
The “High Tech” moment in design started in the early 1970s, as more and more New York City artists were moving into lofts in SoHo’s abandoned cast-iron buildings and furnishing them with functional pieces picked up at hospitals, offices, warehouses and restaurant supply stores. In these open-plan homes and those that aspired to be like them, you were likely to find white walls, exposed pipes, track lighting, Metro Super Erecta wire shelving and stainless-steel commercial refrigerators. In 1980, at the tail-end of that era, the Italian architect and designer Gae Aulenti introduced Table With Wheels, a thick pane of beveled glass mounted on large rubber casters that she intended to resemble the wooden trolleys used to cart heavy pieces around the factory of Milan’s FontanaArte design studio, where she served as art director. The table had the playfulness and poeticism of a Marcel Duchamp readymade, and it presaged glass as one of the decade’s trendy materials for interiors — one seen increasingly throughout the 1980s in the form of smooth reflective surfaces and chunky, semitransparent blocks. In 1993, Aulenti riffed on her design, releasing Tour, an updated model with bicycle wheels. — K.G.
Table With Wheels was at the vanguard of the 1980s trend for glass as a décor element.
De Cárdenas: I know it’s just a piece of glass on casters, but I think it transcends class, style and era.
Moore: You know what else it speaks to? High-tech design.
Daniel Romualdez: If we’re doing high tech, I think we should include the Metro shelves.
Moore: No! That then knocks out Dieter Rams.
7. Dieter Rams, 606 Universal Shelving System, 1960
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Dieter Rams’s 606 Universal Shelving System for Vitsoe.Credit...
© Vitsoe
The German functionalist Dieter Rams didn’t invent modular design, but as the creator of the 606 Universal Shelving System for Vitsoe, he can be credited as one of its early perfecters. The system’s construction is strikingly simple, with aluminum E-Tracks mounted to walls from which shelves, cabinets and even tables can be hung using no-equipment-required pins. Adjustable and customizable, it can be adapted to a wide range of spaces, needs and aesthetics. (When they’re full, the wafer-thin but deceptively strong shelves, made of powder-coated, laser-cut steel, nearly disappear.) The unit embodies all 10 of the design principles that Rams, an early advocate of environmental sustainability, formulated in the 1970s (No. 1: “Good design is innovative”; No. 5: “Good design is unobtrusive”), but the real reason it’s been revered for decades may be its incomparable durability (No. 7: “Good design is long-lasting”). Parts purchased today can be used interchangeably with those from 1960, when the shelving first went into production. — R.C.
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A more elaborate configuration of the 606 Universal Shelving System.Credit...
© Vitsoe
Moore: I’m going to go to bat for Dieter Rams. I’m a big fan of the idea of a system, particularly in terms of the 20th century and how we started to live [in a more transient way], which led to things that collapse or stack and are lightweight. The idea is that you can buy this piece and change it — use it for books, records or clothing. I’m really interested in industrial design, a lot of which we don’t even think of as being designed. It often seems to have come out of nowhere, and I feel that way about this shelving.
Antonelli: If we’re going to include a shelving system, much as I love Metro’s [steel storage] shelves, Dieter Rams should be on here.
Moore: He’s a rock star.
Stout: Even just this image [from the Vitsoe catalog], with a game of Twister stored on a shelf, feels so democratic to me. All these different tiers of design.
Moore: I love the Vitsoe catalog, frankly. It’s very soothing.
8. Faye Toogood, Roly-Poly Chair, 2014
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Faye Toogood, photographed at her studio in Camden, London, in 2023.Credit...
Suki Dhanda
Faye Toogood’s Roly-Poly chair, which debuted in 2014 as part of a collection of similarly rotund fiberglass furniture titled Assemblage 4, isn’t just a seminal piece of design — it’s also got a sense of humor. The key lies in the contrast between its jolly, potbellied seat, evocative of a cartoon animal, with four squat, cylindrical legs, and the confident way it occupies space. The chair is a corporeal symbol of maternal strength; Toogood, a multi-hyphenate British clothing and interior designer, has said that the roundness was inspired by her pregnancy. (“I’ve got fat,” she told an architecture magazine upon the chair’s release.) Indeed, it’s the kind of perch that makes you never want to get up, to relinquish your vanity and drop into a state of permanent comfort. With no hard edges, it’s both cleverly child-safe and endlessly imaginative, conjuring bubble letters, elephants and balloons. But although the Roly-Poly grew out of the designer’s experience with her changing body, it offers something more universal: a softer, more whimsical take on minimalism, which in recent years has turned away from sharp-cornered austerity toward the more organic silhouettes of the circle and the arch. — R.C.
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Toogood’s Roly-Poly chair in raw fiberglass.Credit...
Courtesy of Faye Toogood
Moore: Faye was at the forefront of a movement where things suddenly got soft.
Antonelli: And big.
Delavan: She changed the silhouette.
De Cárdenas: I remember her presentation in Milan in 2011. There were these black hard-boiled eggs, and cheese served on pieces of charcoal. I mean, it sucked scraping your teeth on stuff, but it was also cool. And then there was furniture, but the whole thing was the presentation. Whatever that is, some people do it well and most people don’t. But I think she started it. Everything in design at the time was slick and boxy, highlighting craftsmanship, but this work wasn’t.
Delavan: It felt like something she could have sculpted.
Moore: And it was new. It’s always exciting to be woken up like that.
A Work Space Fit for an Ever-Changing Designer
Feb. 7, 2019
9. Unknown, but Possibly Jean-Michel Frank; Parsons Table; Circa 1930
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The Parsons table, circa 1936-40.Credit...
Ellen McDermott © Smithsonian Institution
Some pieces of furniture are so unobtrusive and chameleon-like that they hardly feel designed. Such is the case with the Parsons table, whose defining feature is its ratio: No matter the table’s size, its legs — which stand flush with the corners of its surface — must always be equal in width to the thickness of its top. It’s thought to have emerged from a design project completed in the early 1930s at the Paris satellite of New York’s Parsons School of Design, the result of an assignment often attributed to the aristocratic French decorator Jean-Michel Frank, who was a lecturer there at the time. (The American designer Joseph B. Platt is also often cited as having a hand in the piece.) Known for creating magisterial spaces for the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli and the composer Cole Porter, Frank put aside his usual interest in such sumptuous materials as shagreen and obsidian, challenging the students to design a table so elemental that it would retain its basic character and integrity regardless of finish. — R.C.
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Jean-Michel Frank, photographed by Rogi André in 1935.Credit...
Digital image © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY
Romualdez: Leading up to this debate, I asked ChatGPT for a list of influential furniture and nothing surprised me. [But] I wanted to [choose items] that influenced me personally. Growing up in the Philippines, I only saw things in magazines — like [1960s François-Xavier] Lalanne sheep [sculptures]. They were in Valentino [Garavani]’s chalet, [Yves] Saint Laurent’s library, the Agnellis’ Milanese apartment.
Moore: Unfortunately, Lalanne sheep are just signifiers of enormous wealth.
Romualdez: Yes, but for me, nose pressed to the glass, it made me question, “What makes something fancy?” People had flocks of them. When Julianne [and I were talking about our lists], she asked, “What’s your favorite dining table?” Although simple and plain, this is the first thing that came to mind.
De Cárdenas: We can’t not include the Parsons table.
Romualdez: A friend of mine, [the American philanthropist] Deeda Blair, used to tell me, “You can’t get an 18th-century coffee table. It’s a conceit of the modern world.” I was attracted to this as a foil to [what’s in] most people’s fancy living rooms.
10. Ettore Sottsass, Ultrafragola Illuminated Mirror, 1970
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Ettore Sottsass’s Ultrafragola mirror illuminates a Sofo rug by Superstudio, a rule-breaking Italian design collective founded in the 1960s.Credit...
Serena Eller Vainicher
Although the Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass’s undulating electrified mirror, which emits a dusky pink glow, predates social media by four decades, it somehow anticipated the age of the selfie. Sottsass, who would in the 1980s spearhead the madcap Milan-based collective known as the Memphis Group, crafted it as an apparent tribute to womanhood — its ripples supposedly reference flowing hair and body curves. Such an idea may now seem a study in objectification; nonetheless, the mirror’s enchantments are undeniable, as proven by its vibrant second life on social media. The musician Frank Ocean and the model Bella Hadid are among those who’ve captured themselves, like modern-day Narcissuses, in its reflection. The appeal is obvious: It’s seductive, flirtatious and lighthearted — décor as an antidepressant in troubling times. Perhaps Sottsass himself best explained why the glowing, flowing mirror is universally beloved. “When I was young, all we ever heard about was functionalism, functionalism, functionalism,” he once said. “It’s not enough. Design should also be sensual and exciting.” — Max Berlinger
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Sottsass, photographed by the lighting and furniture designer Bruno Gecchelin in 1974. Credit...
Bruno Gecchelin 1974 by SIAE. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome
Stout: Sottsass isn’t my favorite, but this has been so influential, especially in terms of marketing and the rise of Corporate Memphis. Even though it’s from the 1970s, it seems to have been made for the Instagram era. He and [the Italian architect and designer] Gaetano Pesce have been so significant to an entire generation of designers, especially right now.
Antonelli: I don’t think we need to include Pesce.
De Cárdenas: Pesce was always niche and was left out of the design conversation for a long time. Now his work feels very relevant again
11. Billy Baldwin, Slipper Chair, 1950s
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Billy Baldwin, photographed with his slipper chairs at his New York City apartment by Alfred Eisenstaedt circa 1974.Credit...
Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Until the 20th century, what we now call the slipper chair was a private affair, a boudoir staple of Victorian-era excess with an armless seat to accommodate the wide petticoats and corset-bound women unable to bend over. But in the 1950s, the American decorator Billy Baldwin yanked the chair with an overstuffed profile out of the dressing room and got it ready for cocktail hour. He threw out the brocade jacquard and flouncy trim for something more clean-cut and modern; the low-to-the ground, high-backed seat became sheathed in a pleated skirt or tight slipcover tailored straight to the floor. (Baldwin believed that too many naked chair legs made a room “restless.”) Still, it didn’t completely escape its beau monde past. Baldwin’s clientele included the likes of socialites Jacqueline Onassis and Nan Kempner. For Diana Vreeland, he designed a slipper chair in a clashing print to complement the fashion editor’s scarlet chintz “garden in hell” room in her Park Avenue apartment. About his stump-legged rejoinders to Continental refinement, Baldwin once said, “We can recognize and give credit where credit is due, to the debt of taste we owe Europe, but we have taste, too.” — Max Lakin
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The Nantucket living room of Michael Gardine, the co-author of “Billy Baldwin: An Autobiography” (1985), decorated by Baldwin in the late 1970s.Credit...
Ernst Beadle, House and Garden © Condé Nast
Romualdez: I’m probably the most traditional decorator in this room. But I think we need to talk about banal furniture that you don’t realize is everywhere — that you don’t even think of as being designed. I was obsessed with this Billy Baldwin chair when I was in school. It’s tiny, but extremely comfortable. And I love that it’s dumb. It doesn’t do anything, which makes it so versatile.
Moore: Every furniture store in America has this chair.
De Cárdenas: I used it one time [for a decorating project]. There was a fabric that the client loved, and we didn’t know how to work it into the room. I was like, “Let’s just make a slipper chair.” It changes its identity every time you upholster it.
Nick Haramis: I grew up quite modestly, and every family in my neighborhood had a version of a slipper chair in the nice room.
Delavan: Originally, the slipper chair was supposed to be in the boudoir. He brought it into the living room.
Romualdez: I also love that he had extremely American taste when most people in that social class were Francophiles.
