Like a Boss

Joe Colombo’s spacey 1965 Elda chair is still a power seat

—HANNAH MARTIN

After Italian designer Joe Colombo visited a shipyard in 1963 that made fiberglass hulls for boats, inspiration struck: Why not use that same hand-molding technique for the base of a chair? The results—a roomy, futuristic armchair in which seven detachable cushions hook into a molded plastic shell on a rotating base—would become an icon. He named it after his wife, Elda. Colombo moved a white fiberglass and black leather model—produced by Italian brand Comfort in 1965—into his own Milan apartment. And soon, after the design debuted at the Eurodomus 1 fair in Genoa, others followed suit. The strange chair (further documented in Joe Colombo: Designer, a new publication by Artbook) captured the 1960s space-age sensibility of fashion designers like Paco Rabanne and Pierre Cardin, and was on its way to the…

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Architectural Digest (Digital) - 1 Issue, January 2022

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