Vintage View: Walking the high wire with steel grid furniture made of air

Highly popular in the late 1960s and 70s, structural steel meshes and grid-work was championed by a number of top designers

Walter Platner chairs c.1966 (armchairs from

Wire and steel latticed furniture with its abstract, cool geometry was highly popular in the late 1960s and 70s. It was the age where string art was tautened over nails, and Spirograph’s hypotrochoids bent young minds.

Airy and hypnotising from every angle as you move across the room, structural steel meshes and grid-work was championed by a number of top designers in the mid-century. Sleek yet honestly industrial, it was feverishly deployed right up against Louis Quinze in Parisian and Milan studios, and staged proudly in the neo-Baroque flash of Hollywood bungalows and edgy Manhattan lofts.