The Butterfly Chair is known by many aliases: the Hardoy chair, the sling chair, or the BKF chair. In my college dorm room, it was the Nap Chair, as close to a hammock as we could get in the wintry Northeast. By any name, the chair has been wildly popular since its creation, offering users an easy-going surfer dude of a lounger. But despite these relaxed associations, the chair's origins are rooted in serious history, from 19th-century military furniture to Le Corbusier's architecture studio.

The first of the Butterfly chairs came out of the Argentinian architectural firm, Grupo Austral, in 1938. The Austral Group was comprised of Jorge Ferrari-Hardoy, Juan Kurchan and Antonio Bonet, who had met as assistants in Le Corbusier's Paris atelier. The chair is occasionally known as the BKF chair, for Bonet-Kurchan-Ferrari, but an official letter from the firm attributed primary authorship of the design to Ferrari-Hardoy, which is why it is also occasionally known as the Hardoy chair.

The chair may have been designed for a project the Austral Group was building in Buenos Aires, but it was first introduced at the 3rd Salon de Artistas Decoradores, a design exhibition held in that city in 1940, where it won two prizes. It also attracted the attention of Edgar Kaufmann jr. [sic] (he didn't like the 'jr.' capitalized), who had just become the Curator of Industrial Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Kaufmann bought two chairs, one for MoMA's collection, and one for his parents' new Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house, Fallingwater. Kaufmann considered it to fall within MoMA's concept of "Good Design," because it was functional, handsome, lightweight, and relatively inexpensive.

First mass-produced in the US by Alvar Aalto's company Artek (the name a contraction of "art" and "technology"), the chair was composed of two bent tubular steel rods welded together, over which a leather sling was hooked, creating a suspended seat. Knoll bought the US rights to the chair in 1947, but stopped production in 1951 because of a seminal court ruling that did not allow Knoll to sue other manufacturers for making unauthorized reproductions of the Butterfly chair — the court determined that Hardoy's chair was itself too similar to earlier precedents to claim copyright protection. While the Butterfly chair was perhaps the first of its kind in tubular steel, similar constructions in wood had been around at least since the 1850s, when an English engineer named Joseph Beverly Fenby created a folding "campaign" sling chair for use by the British military (image 5). 

Because of the similarities within this type of chair, the ones you can buy today are almost certainly not the Hardoy, Artek or Knoll originals — you can often see differences in how the rods are welded together, and of course in the type of cover. Today, we see the Butterfly chair being used in upscale contemporary interiors (Images 1-4, 6 & 7), as design mavens rescue the style from its dorm room associations, reclaiming it on behalf of its prestigious origins.

B.K.F. Chair

Antonio Bonet (Spanish, 1913–1989), Juan Kurchan (Argentine, 1913–1975) and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy (Argentine, 1914–1977)

What Was Good Design? MoMA's Message 1944–56

May 6, 2009–Ongoing

The B.K.F. Chair—also known as the Hardoy Chair, Butterfly Chair, Safari Chair, Sling Chair, or Wing Chair—was designed in Buenos Aires. Its name credits its three designers. The first two B.F.K. chairs to come to the United States went to Fallingwater, Edgar Kaufmann Jr.'s home in Pennsylvania (designed by family friend Frank Lloyd Wright), and to MoMA. Kaufmann accurately predicted that the lightweight and inexpensive lounge chair would become hugely popular in the U.S., particularly on the West Coast. Artek-Pascoe produced the chair from 1941 to 1948, sending royalties back to Argentina

The Hardoy chair, also known as the sling or butterfly chair, owes much of its renown as a midcentury Modernist icon to the perspicacious eye of a Rust Belt department-store scion, Edgar Kaufmann Jr. In 1940, three Argentine architects (members of an association known as Grupo Austral) presented the chair at a Buenos Aires exhibition. The design so impressed Kaufmann, then an industrial-design curator for the Museum of Modern Art, that he promptly imported one for his parents’ new weekend house, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. He imported another for the museum too.

The Hardoy design (named after the Grupo Austral member Jorge Ferrari Hardoy), however, was not entirely original. The butterfly drew upon the Tripolina chair, patented by Joseph Beverly Fenby, a British engineer, in 1877. The chair subsequently became a battlefield favorite because it was wooden and, crucially, it folded. And Fenby himself most likely drew on chairs from former eras, too. “I’m sure the Hardoy is hundreds of years old,” says Bruce Hannah, a chair designer and professor of industrial design at Pratt Institute.

Even so, when Knoll acquired the U.S. production rights in 1947, a phenomenon was born. The chair’s metal base and sack seat represented a rejection of what MoMA’s current design curator Juliet Kinchin calls “the hard-edged kind of machine aesthetic of modernism in the 1930s.” The Hardoy was also a rejection of good posture and formal clothing. “It’s an impossibly improper chair,” Hannah says. “Women have to have pants on to sit in it.” Young families bought it in droves. By Knoll’s estimate, more than five million copies were produced in the 1950s.

Appreciated by connoisseurs, hipsters and students alike, the butterfly also presaged the disposable-furniture onslaught a half-century later. “It appeared at a moment when there was such a demand for cheap furniture, but furniture that identified with a new aesthetic,” Kinchin says. “You’ve got this burst of color and fun really coming into midcentury modern interiors.” Today MoMA holds a Hardoy in its permanent collection, and Walmart sells one for $39. Somehow it all makes sense.“It’s so minimal,” Dror Benshetrit, designer of the well-regarded Peacock Chair, says of its high-low appeal. “It’s so effortless.”

B.Y.O.C.

Joe Cahn, self-proclaimed commissioner of tailgating and butterfly-chair enthusiast, has traveled to more than 850 events. Here, he reflects on the glory of the parking lot.

How do you select a butterfly chair? 

First, I look at the sturdiness — the ones that [can support] at least 250 to 300 pounds. I’m going to buy ones that have a cupholder, the ones that have mesh rather than a solid fabric. In the rain, the solid fabric will just collect a pool, which is unpleasant to sit in.

Do you have any advice for tailgating?

If we’re sitting in our chairs, we’ve got to balance a plate on our laps. Trying to cut on that plate becomes a little difficult. If we’re going to do steak, my advice is kebabs.

By HILARY GREENBAUM and DANA RUBINSTEIN (New York Times)