Design Platform IKONstudio to Debut Archival SOM Seat with Rarify

“There’s so much to be gained from slowing down and entering into a genuine conversation with work that was built out of decades of experience and craft, but that’s not really the world we live in anymore,” laments David Feldberg, CEO of Toronto-headquartered architectural interiors and workplace furniture design company Teknion. At NYCxDesign this year, he is aiming to prove the effort is still worthwhile. On May 16, Feldberg is launching IKONstudio, a platform to adapt and produce historic furniture designs by architects. The following day, this new studio’s first archival seat will make its physical debut to the public in “IKONstudio x Rarify: New Icons,” a Halston-inspired installation at design fair Afternoon Light.

In the 1970s, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)’s Charles Pfister designed the original chair, SOM79, for fashion designer Halston’s studio on the 21st floor of the Olympic Tower in Midtown Manhattan. The seat’s tubular steel frame created a sleek modernist silhouette within the maximalist mirrored-and-red carpeted 12,000-square-foot space. Though the physical studio was closed in 1990 after Halston’s death, it provides continued inspiration to contemporary designers as an immersive and holistically considered space.

To honor that legacy, Rarify and IKONstudio have created a multidisciplinary Afternoon Light exhibition to display the reintroduced SOM79. In the red carpeted (and curtained) entry of the fair, which runs from May 17–19 at WSA in downtown Manhattan, the deep red chair will be shown with contemporary garments by Gabriel Salcedo, a soundscape by Malloy James, and lighting by Shiva Farrokhi. While the chair’s original design intent and material palette remain, IKONstudio has updated its midcentury production for this era, with advanced technology and sustainability in mind.

“For us, this project is about opening things up: shining a light on works that haven’t always been fully seen, while also creating space for new voices and perspectives,” says David Rosenwasser, founder of Rarify, a collectible furniture marketplace where the chair will be available for sale beginning May 16. (It will run interested buyers $1,350.) “It’s that balance between honoring the past and pushing things forward that feels especially energizing right now,” Rosenwasser adds.

SOM79 is one of several pieces in IKONstudio’s inaugural collections, developed in collaboration with Form Portfolios. From June 8 to 10, during Design Days in Chicago, the complete SOM collection, which also includes lounge seating the firm designed for IBM’s World Headquarters, as well as the Louis Kahn Collection with seating, tables, and rugs realized from the late architect’s drawings, will make their debut. Tapping into an era when “total design” was still largely in fashion, many of the original pieces have never been seen publicly. Bringing modernist architects’ little-known, bespoke designs into circulation is “not about nostalgia or revival for its own sake,” assures Feldberg. “It’s about recognizing that great work has more to say.”