Emeco and Gregg Buchbinder's collaboration with Norman Foster told by Jaye Buchbinder

This story starts with a chance meeting in 2003. My dad (Gregg) met John Small (in the industrial design department at Foster + Partners) in Chicago, in an elevator at Neocon. The fortuity of this is only understandable if you’ve been to Neocon. Thousands of visitors to multiple floors, lots of elevators, all full. It’s amazing they ended up in the same one. Later the same day in Chicago, John and Gregg sat down to get to know each other, and see if there was mutual ground for a collaboration.

“You know, on one hand I was a little apprehensive because a lot of times the architects are not actually involved in the day to day of the product department in the same way that an industrial designer is, and not aware of all the requirements needed in our industry to make the chair work. (One time I got a proposal from a major architect with 3 very pointy legs – an art piece more than a hardwearing chair.) On the flip side, I knew some of the projects Norman Foster was working on, specifically the Millau viaduct in France, and knew he was super technical, an engineer, and would be able to figure out how things would work. And it was exciting to work with someone who was working on these major projects.”

As it turns out, the concept for the chair came from Norman Foster himself. At the first meeting in Foster’s office, Norman walked my dad around. The office had about a thousand young architects. They had long tables with no separation between workstations. It had a surprisingly high density of people and close proximity for such serious work. Gregg asked about how people could work so close and do the technical work, Norman said “For us, it is important for people to understand how their area impacts someone else's within a building. When we put a team together, they learn to share information and learn from each other.” This was in 2004 – before open work layouts were en vogue, and it was eye opening.

Now to the chair. Foster's idea was to create something that used the least amount of material, and was the strongest possible for the given application. Foster said he wanted to make the chair lighter than Frank Gehry's Superlight chair for Emeco – which was 9 lb. Nothing like a bit of friendly competition amongst the greats to push the boundaries for us chair makers! Gregg took it as an engineering challenge.

While there were a series of different options and sketches, the original design was not far off from what we ended up with – unlike some of our other collaborations. Norman Foster is very much an engineer's architect. He understood manufacturing problems because that's kind of how he worked. He would send over full size 2D drawings to the factory so they could lay every component part right on the paper to check it.

One of the biggest changes was that Foster had fastened the seat and back to the frame with pop rivets, which made a lot of sense from a labor reduction standpoint. The problem was that the heat treat process we do (to make the chair super strong) can warp the frame, so the seat and back would no longer fit the frame accurately. We ended up welding it instead, Emeco's tried and tested way of doing things since 1944.

The frame is made with a very slim square tube, .75”, much slimmer than our regular tube. To compensate, we increased the inner diameter of the tube, i.e. made it thicker. A smart solution that allowed the extrusion profile to stay slender. We also had to put additional support within the bends of the frame to make sure we had the strength we needed. A lucky side effect of not being able to rivet the seat and back was that welding it all around made the chair even more structurally sound. The chair might look lightweight and delicate, but all these little details make it super robust. Initially, Gregg was concerned with the BIFMA testing until he loaded up 1000 lb of weight in sandbags onto the chair, got a ladder, and sat on top – this offered ample evidence that the chair was going to pass easily. 

The subtle dips in the seat and back are great examples of Foster’s attention to detail, offering strength by avoiding purely orthogonal surfaces, and also there is so much comfort created by those shapes. The collection also features a backless stool in two heights, Norman wanted a stool that would allow open sightlines in spaces, making them look larger. The backless allowed sitters to turn and converse in any direction.

The collection was named 20-06, chosen for the year it was launched and as a nod to our 1006 Navy chair, which we’ve always pronounced “ten-oh-six”. After the final prototypes were signed off for production, we had a pre-launch party in London in Clerkenwell, up the street from St. John's restaurant. A local distributor, Ruth, helped arrange the event where her office was downstairs and apartment upstairs. We hung a 20-06 chair upside down in the window to demonstrate how lightweight the chair was. When Norman Foster arrived at the party he greeted my dad and said, “You know what I like about the chair, it looks anonymous.” The “anonymous” chair got a very positive reception – the party was packed. My dad says it was so exciting to see people spilled out and lined up into the street to see our chair from Hanover, Pennsylvania.

The official launch also took place in London in 2007 at a trade show called Tent. We had one chair floating in the air, tied to a balloon, to show how light it is, and one chair with a giant old anchor on top of it, to show its strength. A great way to showcase the invisible values of 20-06, and, in fact, all Emeco chairs.

Talking to my dad about this collaboration now, twenty years later, my core memory of the 20-06 is when he brought me with him to a meeting in London with Norman Foster to review prototypes. I was in middle school. We did the classic tourist activities – Big Ben, London Eye, and the double decker bus, freezing our Southern California bodies to the seats in a November London. After I almost passed out in the Jack the Ripper exhibition, my dad took me to the meeting with Foster. Thinking back on it, it’s extraordinary that he would take time to greet me, a shivering and chatty 12 year old. Norman Foster, an incredibly accomplished and incredibly kind person.

- Jaye Buchbinder, 2026

PS: As a side note, the simple, timeless, “anonymous character” of the 20-06 collection has allowed it to fit seamlessly into so many different types of settings over the years. In Dallas, for example, it has furnished both the Winspear Opera House (2009) and the Post Malone-designed Raising Cane’s, a Dallas Cowboys-themed chicken restaurant (2023). Not many designs can claim that span.

Photos by Emeco