When Kem Weber was hired by Walt Disney to be the chief designer of the Disney Studio complex in Burbank in 1939, he was already on the leading edge of the Streamline Modern movement. To understand why the Disney animation furniture is so revered, one has to look at Weber’s earlier career and the design movements that influenced him to more fully appreciate the furniture that he designed for Disney.
By 1910, Karl Emanuel Martin (KEM) Weber was an apprentice to leading furniture designer Bruno Paul, a great modernist thinker of the day in Germany and Austria. Pleased with Weber’s work, Paul recommended that he design the German section of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. In May 1914, Weber then left Germany for San Francisco to supervise the construction at the Exposition. But in August 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, the construction drawings he brought with him were confiscated by the U.S. Government, and Weber was stranded in the Bay Area.
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