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From Military to Mohr
How environmentally friendly chairs developed for the Navy ended up in the Student Center.
       
By Kathryn Rindskopf Dohrmann 

In one sense, this story began on April 21, 2006, at the dedication of the Mohr Student Center. On that afternoon, I was on the upper level — in the Overlook Lounge — gazing down at the festivities, when the aluminum chairs below caught my eye. I turned to Adam Cortright, associate director of facilities management and asked, “Adam, are those Emeco chairs?”  He nodded, acknowledging that he had selected them.

Emeco chairs are about as “green” as chairs can be — they are composed of 80 percent recycled aluminum, and of this, 40 percent is post-consumer waste and 40 percent is post-industrial waste. Post-industrial means that manufacturing scrap and trimmings are gathered and reprocessed on site. Post-consumer waste is the crème-de-la-crème of recycled content, deriving from material that has been consumed, discarded and collected. Most post-consumer aluminum waste comes from used soda cans, which is appropriate for a college campus when you think about it. 

Emeco chairs have other “green” attributes. They are strong and durable, designed and constructed to last at least 150 years, and can be recycled at the end of their lifetimes. They offer significant energy savings — the energy density of chairs made from virgin aluminum is 17 times greater than that of chairs made from recycled materials. All said, Emeco chairs are considered environmentally sound choices. They can even help a building project qualify for LEED™ Certification.

Developing Seaworthy Furniture
There is much more to these chairs, however, than their environmental virtue: they also tell an irresistible tale of ingenuity, engineering, and design. In another sense, then, the story of the chairs in Mohr Student Center began in 1944, when the U.S. Navy requested that Emeco (Electric Machine and Engineering Company) manufacture a chair appropriate for destroyers and submarines. The Navy needed seaworthy furniture: lightweight, fireproof, nonmagnetic (so as not to interfere with instruments), and resistant to the effects of salt air. In cooperation with aluminum producer Alcoa, Emeco invented its iconic 1006 chair.

The 1006 chair, also called the Navy chair, was a product of its time, a confluence of mid-century style, invention, and pop culture. During the “Streamline” decades of the ‘30s and ‘40s, industrial designers focused on fluidity and motion. Aluminum, which could be bent and shaped, allowed dynamic ideas to be expressed. (Think of the rounded Airstream Trailer described as “an aluminum-skinned, gleaming silver bullet.”)

These fluid forms were given strength and durability in the 1930s, when engineer Warren MacArthur pioneered a way to anodize aluminum, making it hard (heat-treating aluminum gives it three times the strength of steel) and noncorrosive.  Finally, movies were coming into their own, and the 1940s were the heyday of the “pin-up girl;” in fact there’s a legend at Emeco that Betty Grable’s bottom was the mold for the 1006’s seat.

Many thousands of 1006 chairs found their way to war ships, and then to prisons, hospitals, schools, and other institutions. Their sturdiness, surprising comfort, and brushed aluminum finish reflected — and still reflect — the skill and hours that defined them. One 1006 chair is said to be the product of 77 exacting steps, 50 hands, and 8 hours.

Military Supplier to High-Style Furniture Maker
Although production slowed after the war years, the design community remained intrigued. The chair and its descendants found their way into hotels, restaurants, magazines, television shows and feature-length films. As Jeffrey Hogrefe writes in an article titled “Peace Work,” designers transformed Emeco, the military supplier, into Emeco, the high-style furniture maker.  For example, architect Frank Gehry worked with Emeco to design a flexible six and one-half pound 1006 descendant chair called the Superlight, which is in the permanent collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Design. In addition, French designer Philippe Starck collaborated with Emeco to invent the Hudson chair, part of a collection designed for the Hudson Hotel in New York City. The Hudson chair, conceived as homage to the 1006 chair, became part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 2001.

Fast forward to April 2006: Starck’s Hudson chairs are the silver chairs I spied that day in the Mohr Student Center, which I had to see for myself.  I walked down the steps and checked the back of a chair. There it was: “Emeco by Starck.” Adam had chosen the brushed finish and the version with a padded seat.

Full disclosure: I live with Emeco. The 1006 chairs are my family’s dining chairs.  I’m sitting on one as I write. I lust after Emeco’s Kong chair. I also confess I didn’t know initially that the 1006s were a recycled product.  Architect Stephen Synakowski had suggested them during the course of a remodeling.  I found their curves handsome and their aluminum a little offbeat. They were a good fit for our home and an interesting take on what Marcel Breuer (who designed the equally iconic Wassily chair) called “the problem of sitting.”

Carriers of Meaning, Emotion, and Ideas
In fact, if we consider sitting, chairs, and the idea of “chairness,” this story actually began long ago. As Alain de Botton explains in his 2006 book, The Architecture of Happiness, there is a time-honored architectural tradition of conceptualizing buildings and objects as living forms, as carriers of meaning, emotion, ideas — even morality. Spaces and their contents are speakers, witnesses, memory-keepers, and story-tellers. 

The Emeco chairs in Mohr Student Center are full of stories: they tell, at the least, a “green” story, a design story, a grand old ocean-going, torpedo-proof, proudly made-in-the-USA story.  Over their lifetimes they’ll cheerfully hold a few thousand bottoms, and they’ll witness all the music, movement, culture, and play that make the Mohr Student Center a vibrant, living space.

With an expected lifespan of 150 years, we can think ahead to the year 2157.  How about that? Adam Cortright bought chairs that will be perfect for the Lake Forest College Tricentennial.

Kathryn Rindskopf Dohrmann is a senior lecturer in psychology and chair of the environmental studies program at Lake Forest College.

End notes: Much, though not all, of the information on Emeco chairs in this essay comes from the Emeco Web site (http://www.emeco.net). It’s a lively and informative site — when you visit, be sure to play the segment called “Sit Sat Seat.”  The quote, “aluminum-skinned, gleaming silver bullet,” is from Bryan Burkhart and David Hunt’s book, Airstream: The History of the Land Yacht. The Jeffrey Hogrefe article, “Peace Work,” can be found at: (http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_0500/eme.htm)