We were gobsmacked! Standing in a dimly lit afterhours storefront during a post-dinner stroll in Manchester, Vermont, my wife Mary and I stood mesmerized by a constellation of angled orange tubing that seemed to float behind the plate glass. V-shaped and somewhat triangular pieces seemed almost lit from within, and the abstract geometric called to mind a 1960s blacklight poster rendered in three dimensions. Below the tubular constellation, several cats lounged and wandered on a hardwood floor.
It was a late September evening at dusk, and we stood practically hypnotized in front of Circa50 at 4898 Main Street for a good five minutes. The window also caught the eyes of other passersby who were momentarily captivated before moving on. When we’d arrived, a young bearded man was staring into the space transfixed. “Amazing!” was all he could muster. When we left, his eyes were still focused on the glowing geometry. It was hard tearing ourselves away, for after a few moments the pieces almost seemed to dance.
I’m not much of a shopper, and store windows rarely interest me, but curiosity ignited, I couldn’t help myself. Though I imagined the display would be less vivid in daylight, I returned the next afternoon to snap some photos. Even during the day, the bent pieces of orange pipe were vibrant.
I’d taken a few shots from the sidewalk when a genial man, bald with black frame glasses and a luxuriant goatee, stuck his head out the door and invited me inside. “You look like a serious photographer,” Steve Dunning said to me, “so I thought you might want to get a closer look.” I gushed a moment about my fascination with his art installation and asked if it had a name. He let out a slight chuckle and told me it had no name and was created less out of artistic intent than as a way to promote butterfly chairs, a principal product of Circa50, his furniture company.
The angular pieces of bright orange tubing that seemed to hover in the air were actually butterfly chair frames that had been powder coated, hung from a two-story ceiling with monofilament, and floodlit from above by blue and a few red lights. In fact, it was a room-sized mobile. The details might have been mundane, but the effect was magical. People seemed to find it as engaging as an infant might find colorful shapes hanging over a crib. Steve was fascinated by the attention the installation had garnered, complementing the stream of window watchers who stopped to stare at his work.
Webster defines “butterfly chair” as “a lounging chair consisting of a cloth sling supported by a frame of metal tubing or bars.” The dictionary notes that the chair is named for the resemblance of the cloth sling to the outspread wings of a butterfly. Designed in 1938, Steve had finally gotten the chair to float like butterflies---at least the frame part.
The butterfly was conceived by a trio of architects from Buenos Aires, Argentina—Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan, and Jorge Ferrari Harboy—and it’s sometimes called the BKF or Harboy chair. It’s been said that the designers were inspired by a foldable nineteenth century Italian chair called La Tripolona, used for camping and made of wood and leather. Among the first butterfly models to arrive in the United States was one sent to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it remains in the permanent collection. Edgar Kaufman, Jr., the museum’s then industrial design department director, called it “one of the best efforts of modern chair design.” Since then, other museums have acquired butterfly chairs.
Inexpensive, versatile, and stylish, the chair became wildly popular in the 1950s and 1960s in a wide array of fabrics. When the design fell into the public domain early in the 1950s, production was taken up by a number of manufacturers. Today, cheap knockoffs can be found at most major retailers. But if you want something akin to the craftmanship of the original, Circa50 is a go-to.
Circa50 has been producing butterfly chairs in Vermont since 1997. Frames are made of matte black or stainless steel. They call the classic leather version their “signature piece.” Made one at a time, the seat is “hand cut, and sewn with a coarse, heavy-duty thread.” They also make seats in a couple fabrics with a range of colors. Replacement seats for vintage chairs can be custom fit.
On that first evening encounter when Mary and I stopped short and became spellbound by the glowing orange chair frames, we soon noticed several cats nonchalantly and lazily doing what cats do, and not paying much attention to the human eye candy hanging above them, or the people staring at them. But it didn’t take long for the cats to become an additional source of fascination for us. What were they doing there, we wondered?
Of course, cats have nothing to do with butterfly chairs, except a tendency to want to curl up in one and fall asleep. But Steve loves the furry creatures. For years, he carefully captured feral cats on Manchester’s Main Street and had them spayed or neutered at a local veterinary hospital to keep an uncared-for and burgeoning population in check. Eventually, he adopted ten of them and they have free run of the shop, adding yet another puzzling element to an unusual storefront. Momentarily, they would steal our attention from the network of hanging chair frames, heightening the experience when we turned back to gazing at them again.
Ever creative, Steve will be adding to the walls a series of lime colored plastic panels set on edge. He showed me a sample, and like the chair frames it seemed to glow in the blue and red light. Now, I’ll have a reason to return and again stare through the glass at this ever-evolving and unusual space.
Advertising has a reputation of being bland, loud, crass, or a combination of the three. Circa50’s window is a portal to commercial motivation that results in art. It demonstrates that an effort to draw trade can result in bewitching design if you set the imagination free. Maybe Steve’s conception for bringing attention to his butterfly chairs reinvigorates and gives new meaning to “Miles Law,” first uttered by a mid-twentieth century federal bureaucrat, that “where you stand depends on where you sit."
