![]() “When I started at Disney in May of 1984 on ‘The Black Cauldron,’” Bossert says, “they showed me to an office and said, ‘Here’s your desk.’ It was the basic, Kem Weber Animator’s Desk, big, wide, and solid as a rock, like sitting at a monument. ![]() Naturally, Weber received a steady stream of input from Disney, but Weber also solicited ideas from one of the greatest animators of the 20th century, Frank Thomas, who used the prototype of the desk he helped Weber design-built by the Peterson Showcase & Fixture Company-to complete his work on “Pinocchio.”Īs an animator, Bossert knows these desks well. Bossert offers fresh insights into the Disney-Weber relationship, particularly in the way it affected the half-dozen or so different desk styles Weber designed for character animators, layout artists, and animation directors. In his latest book, Kem Weber: Mid-Century Furniture Designs for the Disney Studios, author and former Disney animator David A. Collection of Tony Anselmo photo by Frank Anzalone. Even the birch plywood desks these animators sat at were customized for their tasks, whether they were sketching storyboards, executing the entry-level grunt work of the “inbetweener,” or painting backgrounds.ĭisney animator office with Kem Weber furniture, courtesy The Walt Disney Family Museum. Weber’s low-rise buildings, which quickly filled with the company’s roughly 800 employees, were sited to maximize northern exposure, ensuring optimal natural light for Disney’s small army of animators. Together, they created a work environment that was designed expressly for animators. As a builder, though, Walt Disney may have been even more ambitious, spending much of 1938 and ’39 consulting with his new studio’s architect, Kem Weber. “It was the basic, Kem Weber Animator’s Desk, big, wide, and solid as a rock, like sitting at a monument.”Īs a filmmaker, Disney always had big plans. But even before the financial success of “Snow White” was assured, Disney had pushed “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia,” into production at his company’s cramped Hyperion Studios-hence the need for a new animation facility in Burbank. At the time, Disney’s first full-length animated feature, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” was on its way to grossing $8 million at the box office, a new record for a motion picture. In the summer of 1938, Walt Disney put $10,000 down on 51 acres of land in Burbank, California, for a new animation studio. Courtesy of Mark Kirkland photo © Dave Bossert. They deserve to be a part of any serious collection of American modernism.Ollie Johnston’s Kem Weber Compact Animator’s Desk. As you will see on these pages, his designs are both intelligent and stylish. ![]() Today, those may be the rarest examples of Weber’s work, but are always worth looking out for. In the end, fewer than 300 Airline chairs were made. Though it seemed perfect for mass production, Weber was never able to convince a major manufacturer to take it on. With its raked, gently angular frame and cantilevered seat, the chair suggests movement, speed and forward progress. His masterpiece is the Airline lounge chair, designed 1934-1935. His reputation as a champion of a new, clean and elegant style earned him architectural commissions and contracts to design furniture and items such silverware, coffee services and cocktail shakers. department store - the largest furniture retailer in the country at the time - Weber regularly traveled around the nation to deliver lectures on modernism. In the mid-1920s, while working for the Los Angeles–based Barker Bros. When design commissions were hard to find, he took jobs as a lumberjack, chicken farmer and art school teacher. But he quickly grew to love California, even if his early years there were difficult. Sent to San Francisco by his teacher-turned-employer, architect Bruno Paul, to oversee an installation at a global design expo, Weber was marooned by the outbreak of World War I. In 1914, he became an accidental immigrant to the U.S. Karl Emanuel Martin Weber - “Kem” was his self-styled nom d’usage - was born and trained in Berlin. In his new home, Weber created a wholly American form of modern design that is sleek and stylish, yet comfortable and practical. Frankl and Ilonka Karascz - who would profoundly affect the course of modernism in the United States. Architect and designer Kem Weber arrived in the United States in the vanguard of a wave of progressive Central European talents - among them, Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, Paul T.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |