Chair

This lecture chair is one of over 100 that architect Roy Lippincott designed for the Old Arts / Clock Tower Building (1926) at 22 Princess St, which he also designed. The chair is significant for its conception as a piece of integrated furniture designed by Lippincott for the Auckland Old Arts/Clock Tower building. The only other examples of Lippincott designing integrated furniture are for the Auckland Museum and the Railway Station.

Roy Alstan Lippincott is an American architect who briefly resided in New Zealand. He studied architecture (1905-9) at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, and on graduation worked for Chicago based firms of Von Holst and Fyfe (1909-11) and Spencer and Powers (1912). In 1913 Lippincott became chief draughtsman to Walter Burley Griffin. The following year he became a junior partner and moved to Australia with Griffin (he also married Griffin’s sister).

Lippincott participated in planning the new capital of Canberra and managed the firm's Melbourne office. In 1920, in partnership with Edward Billson, who also worked in Griffin's office, he won the competition for the Arts Building, University of Auckland, and in 1921 he moved to New Zealand to supervise the construction of this abstracted Gothic-style design. Subsequently, Lippincott established an independent practice in Auckland in 1925. His commercial works, house designs, and educational buildings, became valuable models of Chicago school design for the architectural profession in New Zealand.

Lippincott vigorously advocated university training for architects in New Zealand and also advised on methods of earthquake-resistant construction. Lippincott and his wife returned to the US in 1939 for a visit, but the outbreak of World War cuased him to remain in the US. the USA and practised in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. His work of this period is considered to be less influential than that of the years he spent in New Zealand when he helped counteract the insularity of architecture there by providing a direct link with a key phase of 20th-century American architecture.