First, chairs are affected by changes in technology and materials. The invention of upholstery in the eighteenth century changed the appearance of chairs and produced entirely new types: fauteuils, bergères, sofas. Steam-bending produced the Windsor chair and the bentwood chair. New materials such as tubular steel led to springy cantilever chairs; plywood and fiberglass allowed designers to conceive chair seats that were one-piece shells. Technical innovation was sometimes spurred by a search for economy, sometimes by a desire to discover a new solution to an old problem, and often chairmakers were simply along for the ride, exploiting technological advances in other fields. Like all modern artifacts, chairs reflect the shift from handwork to industrial production, meaning that as old techniques disappeared new ones were found to replace them: bentwood instead of carved wood, tubular steel instead of bentwood, shaped plywood instead of tubular steel, and plastic instead of plywood.
Second, chairs adapt to changing social conditions. The demand for greater informality in the placement of furniture in the eighteenth century encouraged the development of lighter, movable chairs. During the same period, the need for a comfortable place to sit alone for long periods while reading produced the easy chair. Leisurely sea voyages on ocean liners resulted in the recreational deck chair. When people smoked, the chaise de fumeur materialized; when people gave up smoking, the smoking chair—like the smoking jacket—became a distant memory. The advent of television accelerated the popularity of recliners. Similarly, the ergonomic task chair appeared just as people were spending more and more time sitting in front of their computers—at home as well as in the office. The tablet and the smartphone, whose users are not tied to desks, may herald the return of a chaise longue—or the advent of something new.1
Chairs are also affected by posture. It is a chicken-or-egg question, but on the whole I think posture usually comes first. The way we choose to sit is conditioned by culture, not by anatomy, and can change suddenly and unpredictably. How else to explain the emergence of the klismos, the advent of chair-sitting in Song dynasty China, the enthusiasm for rocking chairs in nineteenth-century America, or the popularity of chaises longues among twentieth-century modernists? What is certain is that when posture changes, the old chair no longer serves and a new one is needed. Conversely, if posture remains constant, the old models tend to endure. This may explain the longevity of the wing chair.
Lastly, chairs can be powerful symbols. In North American universities, departments are led—chaired—by chairpersons, endowed professorships are called chairs, and in many institutions retiring faculty are honored with an actual chair—usually a captain’s chair or a Boston rocker, with the university seal on the crest rail. The link between scholars and chairs originated in the ancient Islamic world. Caliphs appointed leading scholars to “chairs” in universities or madrassas, the position so named because professors occupied chairs whereas students sat on the floor.
The earliest symbolic chairs were those reserved for royal, imperial, or religious leaders: St. Edward’s coronation chair in Westminster Abbey, the Dragon Throne of the Chinese emperors, the Peacock Throne of the Persian shahs, the Chair of St. Peter in the Vatican. The identification of the occupant with the chair of state was so complete that we still speak of “ascending the throne” or “usurping the throne.” The regal throne has parliamentary descendants. The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives sits on the most impressive chair in the chamber, although his chair pales by comparison with that of the Speaker of the British House of Commons, which is a canopy-topped, twelve-and-a-half-foot-tall Gothic Revival chair that resembles a small building.
The American president does not occupy a throne; he sits behind a desk. In the past, the presidential desk chair was passed down from incumbent to incumbent: William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson both sat on Theodore Roosevelt’s stylish mahogany-and-rattan swivel desk chair; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt made do with Herbert Hoover’s Colonial-style swivel chair, a cozy seat upholstered in a patterned material. It was Truman, the Midwestern storekeeper, who first used a large leather office chair, and subsequent presidents have followed his lead. A 2009 official White House photograph shows the newly elected President Obama in the Oval Office trying out different desk chairs, while his predecessor’s chair, a contemporary design in black leather with a tall headrest, stands forlornly to the side. Obama settled on a traditional—vaguely Georgian—executive chair with dark brown leather upholstery and curved mahogany arms. John F. Kennedy used an executive chair with a footstool, but the most memorable chair in the room was his rocking chair. It became such a potent symbol that when his succesor, Lyndon Johnson, redecorated the Oval Office, he acquired an identical rocker and pointedly sat on it during meetings.
An Aeron Chair would not suit the Oval Office, a reminder that furniture is generally a handmaiden of decor. When Frank Furness built the main library of the University of Pennsylvania in 1891, he furnished the main reading room with Thonet No. 18 café chairs, whose utilitarian character suited his architecture. (A hundred years later, when Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown restored the library, they chose red sack-back Windsor chairs—more comfortable but still in the spirit of this functionalist yet exuberant building.) In 1928, when the Swedish architect Erik Gunnar Asplund built the Stockholm Public Library, an example of Nordic classicism, he designed reading chairs with broad curved backs that recall klismos chairs. When Robert Adam built the Sackler Library in Oxford in 2001 in an austere classical style influenced by Asplund, he likewise designed a reading chair inspired by the Greek model. When Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus furnished the Seattle Central Library, they chose seating to suit their building. Designed by the Belgian designer Maarten Van Severen, the desk chairs have plain metal legs and a molded black polyurethane seat and back that are pliable and slightly cushiony—industrial chic.
Chairs mirror taste as well as style. In the 1960s, for example, the papasan chair was all the rage. Introduced to the United States from Indonesia, this rattan easy chair consisted of a large bowl-shaped seat, three to four feet in diameter, fitted with a padded cushion. The seat was not attached to the base and could be rotated to be more or less reclined. Inexpensive and unconventional, the papasan was a favorite of college students. Today, there are so many used papasans for sale on the Internet that one writer called them “the Stair Masters of furniture.” The beanbag chair was another 1960s fad. Unlike the papasan, which was a vernacular design, the beanbag was the work of three young Italian furniture designers. Called Sacco, the malleable pear-shaped bag filled with polystyrene pellets could accommodate a variety of postures, from upright to semireclined. Marketed as a nonpoltrona (nonchair), it was a graphic repudiation of mainstream taste. Beanbag chairs were especially good for listening to music, although getting up could be something of a struggle. We had a red Sacco in the late sixties. I also owned a pair of bell-bottom pants and a Nehru jacket. Eventually, the pants and the jacket stayed in the back of the closet; as for the chair, it died—the pellets must have got compressed, for the bag no longer kept its shape. While beanbag chairs are still sold today—in an astonishing variety of shapes and materials and in alarmingly large sizes—they seem like a throwback to an earlier time, a reflection of a particular countercultural moment.
An Artifact of Culture
Today, when I see a Sacco I think of Carnaby Street and Swinging London, just as a bergère, with its padded elbow rests and carved gilded legs, brings to mind Madame de Pompadour, and a sack-back Windsor chair conjures up the Founding Fathers. Different times, different chairs. Perhaps one reason that we create new kinds of chairs is because, in the words of the design critic Ralph Caplan, “a chair is not an artifact of service but an artifact of culture.” That is why the history of the chair is not evolutionary: a cabriole chair is not “better” than a klismos, any more than an Eames lounge chair is superior to a recamier. They are simply different—they convey different meanings, carry different cultural messages, suit di
fferent tastes. “A chair is the first thing you need when you don’t really need anything,” observed Caplan, “and is therefore a peculiarly compelling symbol of civilization.” The way we choose to sit, and what we choose to sit on, says a lot about us: our values, our tastes, the things we hold dear.
If a chair can represent an epoch, what chair will the future consider emblematic of our time? An airplane seat? Business-class seats on transatlantic flights have improved greatly since the days when they resembled overstuffed recliners, but economy seats have, if anything, degenerated as space constraints have made them leaner and meaner. We spend a lot of time in cars. Modern car seats have as many controls as ergonomic task chairs, although the fashion for bucket seats has constrained motility to an excessive degree. A recent ride in the backseat of a vintage Packard convinced me that there is nothing like sitting on a wide couch with freedom to move and plenty of leg room for real comfort.
If not a plane or car seat, what about a designer chair? Few companies have produced as many modern classics as Knoll, the company founded by Hans and Florence Knoll in 1938. I visit the Knoll Museum, which adjoins the company’s manufacturing plant in East Greenville, Pennsylvania. “Museum” makes it sound too grand; it is more like a showroom with some seventy of the company’s chairs on the floor. What makes this museum better than any design collection I’ve ever visited is that you are allowed to sit on the chairs.
Tugendhat Chair (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich)
The oldest design in the museum is Mies van der Rohe’s 1927 cantilever MR10, his first tubular chair.2 It turns out to be reasonably comfortable, with a pleasant wicker seat and wicker-wrapped arms. Two years later Mies produced the Barcelona Chair; roomy, although the slumped position would be wearying over time, and since there are no arms, getting up is awkward. Mies’s Tugendhat Chair, likewise designed with Lilly Reich about the same time, avoids that problem. Reich was an experienced designer, having worked with Josef Hoffman on several chairs. The Tugendhat Chair, a wide cantilever lounge chair with a tufted seat and well-padded arms, is less celebrated than either the MR10 or the Barcelona, but I would prefer it if I were sitting down to read a book. Like the MR10, it is extremely resilient—a bouncy chair. I’d always admired Marcel Breuer’s handsome B35 lounge chair of that same era, but I had never sat on it, and I’m disappointed. Although both the seat and the arms are separately cantilevered there is not much resilience, and the top bar cuts into my back. Next I try Breuer’s molded plywood chaise longue, influenced by Aalto and produced in England in the 1930s. It is more flexible, although unlike Dr. Pascaud’s Sur-repos the confining arms do not swing open, so getting in and out requires ungraceful acrobatics. Not pleasant at all.
A small chair catches my eye. Upholstered in bright red hopsack, it looks like a furry amoeba. It’s the 1940 Museum of Modern Art competition-winner designed by Saarinen and Eames; I’m not sure what it’s doing here, since this reproduction is manufactured by Vitra, a Swiss company. When I sit on it, the laminated wood is slightly springy and the thinly padded upholstery provides firm support. A very nice chair, if somewhat small for me. There are several other Saarinen chairs on the floor. The classic Tulip Chair, with its wineglass base and fiberglass seat, is okay, although it strikes me as less than ideal for dining since it can’t be pulled up to the table—it swivels instead. Yet it remains a popular chair. So does the deceptively simple 1950 Model 71 executive armchair, which was the chair that Niels Diffrient worked on as a Cranbrook student. Charles Eames judged the Model 71 to be Saarinen’s “best functional piece.” Sitting in it I can see why. “Timeless classic” is a hackneyed term, but the Model 71 qualifies.
A nearby executive desk chair is so low-key I almost pass it by. Although the armrests are plastic, the plushy tufted leather looks inviting so I sit down. In some indefinable way, I feel immediately at home—a matter of the generous dimensions, a soft seat, and the cozy sense of being contained. The chair was designed by Charles Pollock in the 1960s, and is said to have taken him five years. “I mean, you just fiddle with it forever and run back and forth to the factory and talk to Mrs. Knoll forever until finally it just gels,” he told an interviewer. Pollock’s fiddling produced a deceptively sophisticated design. The polished metal rim, which looks like a bumper rail, is actually an aluminum extrusion that forms the structure of the chair as well as providing a place to attach the upholstery and the back panel. What dates the design are the minimal controls—only chair height and tilt tension can be adjusted—but this chair doesn’t need more.
Executive chair (Charles Pollock)
The 40/4 stacking chair (not manufactured by Knoll) was another innovative chair that appeared in 1963. Like Pollock, the designer David Rowland worked slowly and it took him eight years to complete the chair, which consisted of a frame of very thin bent steel rods supporting a contoured seat and a back made out of vinyl-coated sheet metal. The light chair—fourteen pounds—was intended to be a temporary seat that could be stored when not in use. The 40/4’s unique feature was that forty of them could be stacked in only four feet—hence the name. Although intended as a temporary seat, it was comfortable and elegant enough to be used in recital halls and restaurants. Variants included armchairs, lounge chairs, writing-arm chairs, barstools, and outdoor chairs, with metal, wood, plastic, or padded seats. The 40/4 replaced the Eames shell chair as the iconic modern chair and became the bestselling designer chair of that epoch.3
The 1950s and ’60s were exceptional decades in American furniture design. Like Saarinen’s Model 71 and Pollock’s executive chair, Rowland’s stacking chair is still in production and still popular. But these chairs can hardly be called emblematic of our time, being more than half a century old. There are more recent chairs displayed in the Knoll Museum, but they are chairs whose time has come and gone: a fragile retro barrel chair designed by Richard Meier in 1982; an equally uncomfortable but more colorful armchair by Ettore Sottsass of the Italian design group Memphis, and three plywood side chairs by Robert Venturi that are fun to look at but definitely not fun to sit on. All are a reminder that nothing ages as quickly as a contrived chair.
40/4 stacking chair (David Rowland)
The Sottsass and Venturi chairs are emblematic of the brief postmodern episode, but like Hector Guimard’s sinuous Art Nouveau furniture of the fin de siècle they are too idiosyncratic to have a long life. A similar fate may befall a line of chairs that Frank Gehry designed for Knoll in 1990. They are constructed entirely of laminated maple veneer strips less than a quarter-inch thick, bent into curves and glued together. The playful chairs, which recall bushel baskets, are extremely light, and the flexible material makes them comfortable to sit on. The chairs have some of the easygoing charm of a deck chair, although their laid-back casualness is deceptive. These are luxury products—you could get a dozen 40/4s for the price of a single Gehry side chair. But who can tell what the future holds? When Thonet stopped manufacturing tubular steel furniture in the late 1930s, few would have anticipated that the Wassily Chair would become the iconic chair of early modernism. It is quite possible that at some future date, the bushel-basket chairs will be judged to be the perfect emblems of our extravagant age.
Flip-Flops
I asked John Dunnigan what he thought would qualify as the emblematic chair of our time. In addition to being an experienced chairmaker, John heads the furniture design department at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is knowledgeable about the history of chairs and I knew he would have an interesting opinion.
Of course one has to first acknowledge that most of the chairs we think of as emblematic of their time were considered that in retrospect, which points out the difficulty of anyone doing that now for our time. And we know that art history and criticism are not impartial. Having said that, as strong as the celebrity designer chair market has been over the last thirty years, the chair that is most representative in my opinion is unquestionably the anonymous monobloc polypropylene chair. I’ve been
fascinated by this chair for many years since I bought my first one at a supermarket in the 1980s. Versions of it are produced by companies around the world. It’s a technical tour de force, a marketing miracle, a cultural phenomenon, and potentially an environmental disaster, which could be emblematic of our time, too.
The monobloc (meaning one-piece) chair to which Dunnigan was referring, sometimes called a resin chair, is the ubiquitous white plastic patio chair that sells for as little as ten dollars—your local supermarket probably has stacks of them.
Monobloc plastic patio chair
The Milanese journalist Marco Velardi, who edits Apartamento, an offbeat “everyday life interiors magazine,” gave the same answer when I asked him about today’s emblematic chair. “It’s not easy to define a chair of our time, but the first thing that came to my mind was a plastic chair. If I think of my childhood and the times I’ve traveled and visited places, and with that I don’t mean fancy places that are trying to be fashionable or trendy, I think of plastic chairs, in their many shapes, simple or more refined, in cafés, airports, hospitals, offices, apartments.” My friend Andrew Morrison, who has designed several chairs for Knoll, as well as a long-lived open-plan office system, agreed. “The plastic chair is our major contribution to chair design,” he told me. “It got rid of all those damn joints. Whenever I see a television report about a terrorist bombing in the Middle East there are intact plastic chairs strewn all over the place. Wooden chairs would never survive the blast, they’d be splintered to pieces.” In the early 1960s, freshly graduated from Pratt Institute, Andrew, who already had a chair in production, proposed a one-piece fiberglass chair to Knoll. “Florence Knoll told me, ‘It’s not for us,’” he recalls. “At that point injection-molded chairs didn’t exist,” he said. “There were only two large injection machines in the United States, and they were making dashboards for Ford.”
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