40/4 Chair

• Name — 40/4 chair • Designer — David Rowland • Date — 1964 • Materials — Frame: steel rod; seat and back: coated steel, wood veneers, plastic resin, or upholstery (depending on model) • Style — Modern • Sold By — Howe a/s

Rowland developed the 40/4 chair over a period of eight years. In 1963, he was awarded a patent for the chair's design. Initially, Rowland showed the chair to many companies in an effort to license the design. In 1961, Florence Knoll licensed the chair for her company, Knoll Associates; however, she canceled the license after six months. Rowland later showed the chair to Davis Allen, head of interior design at the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). Allen requested 17,000 chairs for the campus SOM that was being designed for the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). To fulfill the request, Rowland licensed the design to General Fireproofing Co. (GF) in Youngstown, Ohio. In May 1965, while the first order was still being produced, 250 chairs were hand assembled and installed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for the opening of its new wing. The 40/4 was an immediate success. It won the grand prize at the prestigious 13th Milan Triennale, and has been included in museum collections and exhibitions internationally. In the book The Modern Chair, Clement Meadmore described the chair as having "beautiful simplicity and total appropriateness." In 1973, 2,500 of the chairs were installed in St. Paul's Cathedral in London, which was in 1981 the site of Prince Charles and Princess Diana's wedding. In 2001, it was named #1 of "The Top 10 Commercial Interiors products of the Past 50 Years" by Contract Design Magazine. The chair has been in continuous production since its introduction and has sold over 8 million units. General Fireproofing held the license for the chair from 1963 until 2002 when the company was taken over by OSI Furniture LLC. In 2013, Howe Europe, (now Howe a/s), of Denmark, which had had a sublicense to the chair in Europe, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Asia (except for Indonesia) acquired the license for the 40/4 in the United States and Canada. In Indonesia, PT. Indovickers Furnitama holds the license, and also produces the 40/4 in a rattan version.

• The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, New York • The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York • The Palais du Louvre, Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France • The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England • The Design Museum, London, England • The University of Dundee Museum, Dundee, Scotland • Die Neue Sammlung, Munich, Germany • The Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil • The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois • The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan • Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Montreal, Canada