US$490.00 In 2009, Peter Shire and the Modernica Studio teamed up and designed the Prince Charles Base. By combining the modern and the classic, the chair has been described as a distant cousin of Queen Anne.“Shire’s interpretation on the modern classic incorporates 300-years of furniture design into a single chair. By giving the signature shell chair a set of violin-like legs, Shire’s adds a touch of the Victorian era to the seat.”Easily one of the most important and recognizable designs of the twentieth century. The Fiberglass Shell Chairs were originally designed in 1948, as an entry in The Museum of Modern Art’s International Design Competition. At the time, no one could possibly have anticipated the massive success and longevity of this iconic design.In the early fifties, fiberglass was considered an ultra-high tech material. Produced with a mixture of resin and glass fibers, it was lightweight, yet heavy-duty. Initial development and production was through Zenith Plastics—early pioneers of developing fiberglass for household and military applications. As for the chair bases, they were cleverly designed to provide a number of leg options that would be interchangeable within and between the arm shell and the side shell.The shell chairs were first available in the spring of 1950. The first runs of the chairs were produced in only three colors; griege, elephant-hide gray, and parchment—all of which had interesting translucent qualities. The chairs were distributed until 1983.In 2000, Modernica revived this potentially lost art of high-pressure, molded fiberglass. Modernica creates each shell, by hand, one-by-one, in our Los Angeles factory—just as they had been designed, developed, and produced in Southern California in the 1950s. Modernica uses all of the original presses and specialized equipment obtained from Century Plastics. To ensure authenticity of production, the initial shell chair production was overseen by Sol Fingerhut and...