World-renowned as he was, modern American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was naturally tapped for international projects, the most famous example of which is the Peacock Chair, for the interior of Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel in 1921. Wright firmly believed in interior design as a continuation of architecture—the furniture and decor had to flow with the bones of a building. Most of the homes he built or designed had furniture built specifically for them.
Wright said “Every chair must be designed for the building it will be in.”
The Imperial Hotel, Tokyo was built to accommodate an increase in Western visitors, with certain portions of the structure (including the new, main building) designed by Wright himself. He designed the structure in a “Mayan Revival Style” which lent itself well to the Japanese aesthetic: low, horizontal rooflines, geometry, and symmetry. The Peacock chair was designed for the famous Peacock Room, with its angular, pointed roofline. Its hexagonal back, hexagons created in the negative space of the legs, and the complicated leg structure echo the lines of the room itself, and shapes found throughout the building’s architecture. The Peacock Chair was notoriously fragile, and had to be replaced up to three times during the lifespan of the hotel.
While the hotel mostly survived the great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923, it suffered damage in 1945 during WWII from bombs, which destroyed the Peacock Room. The hotel was torn down in 1968, but portions and recreations exist in museums in Tokyo today.