Kem Weber

Dorothy Grafly, "Kem Weber: Industrial Designer," Design, vol. 49, May 1948, pp. 15-16 and 22

David Gebhard, Kem Weber: The Moderne in Southern California 1920 through 1941, Santa Barbara, 1969, p. 81, no. 62

James D. Beebe, Tubular Steel and Metal-Framed Furniture of the Lloyd Manufacturing Company in Menominee, Michigan, 1929-1947, The Bard Graduate Center, New York, 2000, p. 185

Jason T. Busch and Catherine L. Futter, Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs, 1851-1939, Pittsburgh, 2012, p. 236 (for the model in the collection of Yale University Art Gallery)

Christopher Long, Kem Weber: Designer and Architect, New Haven, 2014, front cover

European-born but thoroughly American in his design impulses, Kem Weber was one of the biggest proponents of the Streamline Moderne movement in America in the 1930s, which echoed the industrial age of the time and emphasized streamlined, curved forms that often appear stretched and horizontally-inclined. The present LC-52 Lounge Chair  was designed in 1935 for the Lloyd Manufacturing Company in Menominee, Michigan as part of the company’s push to produce “chromium furniture for the modern age.” The present chair perfectly encapsulates the designer’s modernist inclinations, its frame consisting of a single piece of tubular steel that loops back into itself to form the leg support, arms, and back, all of which support upholstered sections that appear to float in between the looped arms. The chair reflects the designer’s career-long usage of swooping forms and industrial materials that equally prioritize comfort as they do elegance. As Weber remarked, “The obligation of a chair to be structurally sound was not enough. In addition to comfort, it must be pleasant to the eye in line and style.”