Happy Birthday, LEM!

Over twenty years ago, the designers Shin & Tomoko Azumi presented the LEM chair designed for Lapalma at the Salone del Mobile. A success story.

Described by its designers as “a ring that floats in the air,” Shin & Tomoko Azumi’s LEM chair for Lapalma made its debut at the Salone del Mobile di Milano in 2000. Twenty years on, LEM is celebrating its anniversary with a million virtual candles, to mark the million units sold all over the world since then.

The story of this stool with its slender, light silhouette achieved by the continuous line between the seat and the footrest is quite intriguing. In 1996, two young London-based Japanese designers gave the founders of Lapalma, Dario and Romano Marcato, a small brochure containing a few hand-drawn sketches at IMM Cologne. Just a few pencil strokes instantly sufficed to grab the attention of the two entrepreneurs . The time wasn’t right, however. Three years later, they came together again, with a fresh set of drawings, before embarking on 12 months of tests in a bid to come up with the technology needed to pull off the seemingly impossible: the double curvature of the rectangular section tubular steel that defines the profile of the stool.

Following an intense period of research to find the correct bending parameters, that pinpoint precision that informs the complex simplicity of the seat, the new millennium ushered in the birth of LEM. Now, however, it only takes fifty seconds to shape its characteristic continuous and acrobatic line. The name of the product refers to the Lunar Excursion Module which took two astronauts down to the surface of the moon in 1969. The designers’ concept reflects the same lightness and attempts to reproduce the same lack of gravity, enabling the space created by the design to set up a relationship with the space around it. Just like Apollo 11, it could not support any extra weight, and thus LEM’s versatility is encompassed by its elegant, minimal profile. Just the essential, the rest was left on the ground, making for a perfect synthesis of Japanese culture and Italian high tech.

Just a few months after its Salone debut, LEM was showcased at London’s Conran Shop, a design world institution, and entered the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2008, before featuring in many different contexts around the world, such as the Munich BMW Museum, Schiphol Airport, the Birmingham Library and Google’s headquarters in Japan. It has earned innumerable plaudits.

LEM has celebrated its anniversary with six new finishes – (olive green, coffee, brick red, pale blue, dove grey and pearl), supplementing the pure black and white in which LEM had previously been produced. Let’s face it, after twenty years, a touch of vanity is allowed.