The Lockheed Lounge is an iconic piece of limited edition furniture created by Australian designer Marc Newson in 1988. To this day it retains its title as the world’s most expensive design object by a living designer, having sold at auction in 2015 for well over £2 million.
The Art Gallery of South Australia should be feeling pretty good about that. An early version of the lounge, named LC1, was displayed at Marc’s first exhibition at Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley Gallery in 1986, and was acquired by the gallery for A$3,000. It remains in their collection.
The Lockheed Lounge is known for its distinctive design that combines familiar yet retro industrial materials (riveted aluminium cladding) with a sleek, futuristic form and aesthetic. The name “Lockheed” is a nod to the US Lockheed aerospace corporation, and specifically the 1946 Lockheed L-049 Constellation, the first post-war civilian version of a military transport aircraft used during World War II.
Marc’s inspiration for the work was both aeronautical (he was a big fan of The Jetsons) and organic. Also, as a keen surfer growing up in Sydney he was exposed to the process involved in the foam shaping and fibreglass covering of surfboards. Indeed, that’s how Marc fashioned the prototypes for the Lockheed Lounge, by taking a coarse wire brush to a block of foam until he was happy with the shape, applying the fibreglass skin and then painstakingly covering it all with individually cut and filed squares of aluminium, welded and riveted in place.
The result is striking. It’s a sexy beast. There’s no denying it.
Marc, who studied jewellery design at Sydney College of the Arts, was a focused maker and problem solver from a young age, spending hours in his grandfather’s garage dismantling watches and radios, building bicycles and balsa planes. He learned how to make things, using a diverse mix of materials … and how to strike that shifting balance between form and function.
But he also learned something just as important. He came to understand at a deep level what it takes to make something cool [RR2:03]. His 40-year body of work shows us that he knows, at an intuitive level, what to add in, what to leave out, where to put the logo, and the precise shade of orange (or whatever colour) that something needs, to take it from good to great. Call it designer’s rock of eye [RR1:59].
The Lockheed Lounge was always going to be a breakthrough project for Marc, and it’s fortunate that it happened so early in his career. In 1989 the designer Philippe Starck [RR1:42] convinced developer Ian Schrager to acquire one for the lobby of the hip Paramount Hotel in New York; then it appeared in Madonna’s 1993 music video for “Rain” – creating huge awareness for the piece and cementing its status as a symbol of luxury and high art/design.
The chair is regarded as a masterpiece of late 20th-century design, symbolising a fusion of art, industrial design and craft. It was included in Vitra Design Museum’s “100 Masterpieces” in 1995, and Carnegie Art Museum’s exhibition on aluminium in 2000 … both highly validating.
Design critic Alice Rawsthorn called Newson “one of the most influential designers of his generation”. Fellow designer and friend Jony Ive, previously Chief Design Officer at Apple, described him in a 2012 New York Times Magazine piece as “fairly peerless now” – and the spark that lit the Marc Newson fire was arguably the Lockheed Lounge.
Browse the radical diversity of Marc’s work on his website HERE or Instagram HERE.
Video Treat
References
dezeen.com/2015/04/29/marc-newson-lockheed-lounge-new-auction-record-design-object-phillips
sothebysinstitute.com/news-and-events/news/marc-newson-lockheed-lounge-chair
forbes.com.au/life/style/influential-australian-designer-marc-newson-im-a-gun-for-hire
nytimes.com/2012/01/29/magazine/marc-newson.html
agsa.sa.gov.au/collection-publications/collection/works/lc1-chaise-longue
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