UPDATE: The auction has concluded and more than £5.6 million was made. Find out how much the famous, architect-designed relics went for after the break.
Next week, a rare collection of over 100 relics designed by some of architecture’s most significant practitioners from the last two centuries will be auctioned off at the Phillip’s in London. Ranging from a full-scale paper tea house by this year’s Pritzker laureate Shigeru Ban to the Peacock chair designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, the items being showcased and sold are an ode to the ideas in which have had a profound impact on our built environment.
An exhibition of the items, appropriately titled “The Architect,” is already underway, prior to the auction on April 29.
Works by Gerrit Rietveld, Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer are all available for purchase. Read on for a preview of the highlighted items...
Otto Wagner: Armchair, designed for the Director's Office of the Österreichische Postsparkasse, Vienna, 1906 (Sold for £27,500)
Frank Lloyd Wright: 'Peacock' chair, designed for the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, designed 1921-1922 (Sold for £35,000)
Gerrit Rietveld: 'Berlin' chair, designed 1923, executed circa 1957 (Sold for £16,250)
Marcel Breuer: Chair, model no. WB 301, circa 1933-1934
Franco Albini: Early and rare rocking chaise longue,circa 1940 (Sold for £10,000)
Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret: Ventilator shutter, designed for the administrative buildings, Chandigarh, model no. LC-EA-05-A, circa 1958
Paul Rudolph: 'Rolling' armchair, circa 1968 (Sold for £10,000)
Jean Prouvé: Panel, from the Institut de l'Environnement, Paris, 1968 (Sold for £11,250)
Oscar Niemeyer: Pair of 'Aran' lounge chairs, circa 1975 (Sold for £32,500)
Buckminster Fuller: Unique ‘Dymaxion Airocean World Map’, for the Third National Bank, Dayton, 1979 (Sold for £56,250)
Richard Meier: Rocking chaise longue, 1978-1982 (Sold for £10,000)
Shigeru Ban: 'PTH-02 Paper Tea House', 2006
Steven Holl: Unique prototype, bamboo 'Porosity Bench',2008
"The objects that we have on offer are spectacular, but it's the ideas behind them, intangible within them, that make this collection of things so interesting," said curator and American architect Lee Mindel to WSJ. "It's about being educated about these architects, their intentions, who they were, how they thought, and contextualizing them in a kind of genealogy of the world. Then you can understand their philosophy, and consider how they were able to extrapolate that and put it into this tangible object."
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