Focusing on Ernest Race’s two chair designs for mass seating at the 1951 Festival of Britain — the ‘Antelope’ and the ‘Springbok’ — my thesis aims to examine the relation between their strikingly open, spare forms and the post-war society in which there were produced. I would like to suggest how they might function, beyond their utilitarian use, as material expressions of a politics of insubstantiality and transparency, signifying, perhaps, a more open and democratic, less class-bound society.
I would also like to offer a discussion of the way in which the chairs — which make a virtue of the limited materials available for furniture production in the immediate post-war period — allow the exhibition of people themselves within the highly spectacular South Bank site, underscoring the ideas of social democracy and collectivism that were central to the festival project.
Drawing on a number of primary sources — from the chairs themselves, through photography and film of the furniture in situ, to festival-related documentation and publications from the Design Council Archive and other collections — my project hopes to correct what I consider to be a point of relative design-historical obscurity through a focused and critical analysis of Race’s work, which has, remarkably, received only limited scholarly attention to date.