Side chair from the Larkin Building
Frank Lloyd Wright American
This iconic slant back side chair was designed for one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s earliest non-residential masterpieces, the Larkin Soap Company Administration Building (1904) in Buffalo, New York. Chairs of this design can be seen in period photographs of the building’s interiors as extra seating in the main light court; as library chairs on the fourth floor of the annex; and as dining chairs at long tables in the fifth-floor restaurant. While it appears that there were many of these chairs in the building originally, this chair is now a rare object, since very few seem to have survived after the company went out of business in1945, and the building was demolished in 1950. The Met owns another similar slant back side chair (1981.437), but it has much taller back stiles. Wright used this design with the taller stiles in several commissions around the same period of time, including his own Oak Park home and studio.
