On a recent road trip I listed to a podcast about the Emeco Navy Chair. I’m not much interested in modernist furniture so I’d never heard of one before. Emeco got its start building indestructible and fireproof chairs for US Navy submarines in 1944. They built hundreds of thousands of these aluminum chairs but by the late 20th century Emeco was going bankrupt. The company was saved when the owner overheard a heated conversation between the office manager and some guy named Georgio Armani. Emeco then decided to sell their chairs to upscale architectural firms and designers instead of to the government. Their current chairs are all aluminum, still made in the original PA factory and sell for $700 USD or so. The legend is that you can toss one out an eight story window and it won’t break. You can also get one in fire red.
The podcast link is below and also to a video of Emeco manufacturing. When I saw the chair-making video, I was reminded of videos from the old US Cannondale plant. Pretty cool.
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