“Designing a piece of furniture? It’s like designing a car,” explains a smiling Chris Bangle. “It is still about evoking an emotion, suggesting the idea of something that is not obvious, that is not already present in the object, exploiting the stylistic expedients of one’s own creativity.”
Meeting a car designer at the presentation of a chair that is apparently so far away from the dynamism of a car, is not a common experience even during Milan Design Week. But in this reinterpretation of the Fendi Casa Audrey armchair, made for charity together with Foglizzo hides, one finds in large part the wish to dare that has always inspired Bangle’s work, from the seat covers/sleeping bags of the 1983 Opel Junior, to the cuts on the fenders of the 1994 Fiat Coupe, to the bold surfaces that made him famous with the BMWs of the early 2000s.
Here, on the soft, rather vintage layout of the starting piece, we have alternating hides of different yields: dark nappa, portions with gold highlights, laser perforated inserts like arabesques and a magenta horse hide flap that is revealed by lifting the lining. Everything is crossed by gilded hinges that break up the surfaces and play down the classical shape, creating a rather rockish pattern and giving the armchair an almost mechanical expressiveness.
This version of the Audrey armchair will be put up for auction on the online Charity Stars platform to help the Red Cross support effort in favour of the people affected by the 2016 earthquake in Abruzzo. Seen live the chair is astonishing above all for its absolute distance from the automotive world, a demonstration of total design versatility. “It is a question of mindset: the car is full of stereotypes and sometimes those who work in the sector never manage to go beyond the conventions, ‘out of the box’,” explains Chris. Which is something he’s been doing for over thirty years.
#ChrisBangle @foglizzoleather
