Wacky Wobbler
Wacky Wobbler
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The Conran Shop is selling Big Brother's tenth famous diary room chair for you to take back to your own, hopefully more sane and friendly, house. So if you're not wacky or self–involved enough to be a Big Brother housemate you can still get involved by having some of the (few) cool things that BB has this year.
Big Brother has gone for a modern vintage look in 2009 with a bright and colourful Proust Geometrica chair for the housemates to moan and cry and have hysterics in. You could use yours to recreate these kinds of embarrassing moments or just sit back in it and marvel at the hand–finished asymmetric design. If you're not a halfwit, I'd choose the latter!
The armchair certainly is a loud statement piece and I think the BB interior stylists have come up trumps this year. Remember the eyesore of the silver sci–fi chair last year? Yuck!
This year's beauty is available from The Conran Shop for £7,700 and must be well worth the money as the waiting list is as long as a queue of attention seekers at a BB audition. I know what you're thinking – 'that's a long queue! I couldn't possibly wait an eternity!' It's actually between one and two months which then gives you time to install the cameras!
Enough BB puns; let's have a bit of history. The funky geometric chair was first created in 1978 for the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. It also made Proust an icon of twentieth century design. Fifteen years later Cappellini inherited the piece and since then Alessandro Mendini has reupholstered it in this new cotton fabric.
For more chit chat about Big Brother's diary room chairs, check out our lowdown on Arne Jacobsen who designed the Egg Chair used in the first series all those years ago.
Modern furniture refers to furniture produced from the late 19th century through the present that is influenced by modernism. It was a tremendous departure from all furniture design that had gone before it. Dark or gilded carved wood and richly patterned fabrics gave way to the glittering simplicity and geometry of polished metal. The forms of furniture evolved from visually heavy to visually light.
Prior to the modernist design movement there was an emphasis on furniture as ornament, the length of time a piece took to create was often a measure of its value and desirability. During the first half of the 20th Century a new philosophy emerged shifting the emphasis to function and accessibility. Western design generally, whether architectural or design of furniture had for millennia sought to convey an idea of lineage, a connection with tradition and history. The modern movement sought newness, originality, technical innovation, and ultimately the message that it conveyed spoke of the present and the future, rather than of what had gone before it.
Modernist design seems to have evolved out of a combination of influences: Technically innovative materials and manufacturing methods, the new philosophies that emerged from the Werkbund and the Bauhaus School, from exotic foreign influences, from Art Nouveau and from the tremendous creativity of the artists and designers of that era.
Today contemporary furniture designers and manufacturers continue to evolve design. Still seeking new materials, with which to produce unique forms, still employing simplicity and lightness of form, in preference to heavy ornament. And most of all they are still endeavoring to step beyond what has gone before to create entirely new visual experiences for us.
The designs that prompted this paradigm shift were produced in the middle of the 20th century, most of them well before 1960. And yet they are still regarded internationally as symbols of the modern age, the present and perhaps even the future. Modern Classic Furniture became an icon of elegance and sophistication.