The Facts
On October 14, 2026, the Centre Pompidou published a feature on Olivier Mourgue's Djinn seating family, noting that the French designer died on October 5, 2026, at age 87. Mourgue designed the low, continuous-form seats with a steel-tube frame hidden under polyurethane foam and a stretch-jersey cover, and Airborne produced the family in 1964-1965. Several Djinn models from that period are now in the Pompidou collection, where they entered in 1993; the chairs appeared in the space-station lounge in Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968). The museum also holds his Fleurs floor lamp, donated in 1994, and a Bouloum seat, acquired in 2010.
The Signal
The feature functions as an institutional tribute coordinated with Mourgue's death, underscoring the Pompidou's long engagement with his work: the collection has acquired or received pieces by him from 1993 to 2010. For collectors and curators, the timing highlights Mourgue's historical standing as a designer whose pop-era experiments with polyurethane and jersey anticipated a more informal way of living; his place in '2001: A Space Odyssey' gives the Djinn line lasting cultural resonance.
- Artists: Olivier Mourgue
- People: Olivier Mourgue, Stanley Kubrick
- Museums: Centre Pompidou
- Locations: Paris
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