European designers were developing theoretical approaches to the body techniques of sitting. The Danish designer, architect, and teacher Kaare Klint began to study human proportions and to construct chairs and other furniture as rational systems for living. In 1928 in France, the team of Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, and Pierre Jeanneret introduced a chaise longue inspired by illustrations of Pascaud’s Surrepos. It had a fixed S curve with an elevated headrest. Made by Thonet in Paris in 1930, it was supported by tubular runners that could change position while resting in a base; removed from the base, the chair became a reclining rocker like Thonet’s 1883 sofa. Following Hofmann’s lead in developing a modernist furniture doctrine, Le Corbusier claimed a rationalist clarity for the group’s work. A chair was not just a “machine for living” but a “human limb object,” a supporting prosthetic device. The Thonet chaise was also a brilliant synthesis of the masculine and feminine styles of reclining. For the prototype Le Corbusier used pony skin and declared he had been inspired by the image of a pipe-smoking cowboy of the old West, tilting back at ease with his boots on the mantelpiece. Yet the early advertisements for the chair featured a languorous Charlotte Perriand, like a latter-day Mme Récamier, but with her face turned enigmatically from the camera.24
European recliners of the 1930s were luxury goods. Le Corbusier might have been inspired by the mass production methods of automobile and aircraft factories, but his Thonet chaise-longue à réglage continu (continuously adjustable) required even more hand craftsmanship than the company’s already high-priced rocking sofa. Polished metal exposes every minor defect mercilessly. Like Hofmann’s Sitzmaschine, Le Corbusier’s chair commands exceptional prices in today’s market not just for its exceptional beauty but for its rarity. Few were ever sold. In the search for comfort, Americans were producing homely, conventional seating in growing numbers; Europeans were announcing bold modernist experiments that reached but a small number of wealthy connoisseurs when they did not remain at the prototype stage, like the varnished-steel and canvas “Grand Repos” (1928) of the designer Jean Prouvé, which tilted backward on ball bearings, counterbalanced by springs. The modernist dream of machine-age living proved a mirage, and not just because of its price. People who worked in factories, as critics observed, shunned the industrial aesthetic in their homes.
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: ANTON LORENZ
There was one man who realized that European modernism could be fused with American mass production: the Hungarian-born inventor and entrepreneur Anton Lorenz (1891–1964), a link between the high modernism of the Bauhaus and the pragmatism of the U.S. furniture trade.25
Legendary in the furniture industry of the 1950s and 1960s, Lorenz never had his own manufacturing company in the United States. Even as an inventor, he remained in the background after the early 1950s. He had no children and no close friends or confidants; the associates he financed were independent inventors and designers. His extended family remained in Hungary, and his personal correspondence with them has been lost. What remains of his business correspondence is dispersed and uncatalogued. As one of his attorneys puts it, “he lived for his wife and his chairs.” Yet Lorenz’s intensity affected not only the companies with which he worked but their tenacious competitors. For all his thick Hungarian accent and Old World manners, he accelerated a change in American popular culture.26
Lorenz was born in Budapest in 1891, and in 1913 he began to teach history and geography, probably in a secondary school; details of his education, military service, and employment are sketchy. He married an opera singer and moved to Germany when she accepted a position in Leipzig. Lorenz somehow entered the lock manufacturing business in the early 1920s and was successful enough to abandon his teaching career and relocate to Berlin. There he met the Hungarian architects Marcel Breuer and Kalman Lengyel, affiliated with the Bauhaus in Dessau, and managed Lengyel’s company, which manufactured tubular steel chairs of their design. Through aggressive management of the patents of others, especially the Dutch designer Mart Stam, he dominated the growing tubular steel furniture industry27
Lorenz must have been aware of contemporary interest in reclining furniture as equipment for optimal rest. One of his associates, the Bauhaus architect Hans Luckhardt, began to design “movement chairs” in the early 1930s, including a slatted wooden chaise longue with a neck roll and linkages that extended a footrest as the sitter reclined, cradling the back and thighs and supporting the lower legs. A knob mounted at the side edge of the seat could be screwed down against a slotted wooden link to permit continuous adjustment between slight and full reclining. Lorenz helped develop it for Thonet, which called this wooden chair the Siesta Medizinal and still produces it today. Unlike previous convalescent chairs, built by cabinetmakers or metalworking firms, the Siesta had a theoretical agenda: allowing the greatest possible relaxation of the sitter’s muscles. Luckhardt had been studying physiology since 1934, and Lorenz also began to devour medical texts. Just as coaches and architects helped make the modern running shoe, nonscientists were among the founders of ergonomic seating. Lorenz financed research at the Kaiser Wilhelm (now Max Planck) Institute for Industrial Physiology in Dortmund to validate the chair’s design. Subjects were lightly supported in tanks of salt water, then photographed to determine the angles that trunk, thighs, and lower legs assumed in near weightlessness. A scientist and later director of the institute, Gunther Lehmann, wrote that this experiment was the first attempt to determine the true resting position of the limbs, although as we have seen, the relaxing position had been known from the 1870s.28
The Siesta chair appears to have been successful in a mainly institutional market. Air France was testing an upholstered version before the war broke out. Even the Nazi taboo on Bauhaus design was inconsistent; Anton Lorenz saved in his files an undated photograph of Adolf Hitler himself sitting stiffly in one of Lorenz’s tubular-steel lounge chairs. By 1940, German military hospitals were using a tubular-steel wheelchair version of the Siesta. Lorenz, who happened to be in the United States on business when the war broke out, remained, escaping the destruction of his Berlin apartment and office.29
THE ROAD TO BUFFALO
Lorenz first settled in Chicago, possibly because of his association with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Though they were once legal adversaries in Germany, they respected each other and at least one U.S. patent bears both men’s names. Cut off from his European businesses, Lorenz enrolled in a two-year course in human physiology and claimed to have studied two thousand books and articles in that field. Meanwhile, he was introduced to Nelson Graves, president of the Barcalo Manufacturing Company of Buffalo, New York, at the 1940 Chicago Furniture Show. Lorenz offered him an exclusive license on the reclining chairs he had been developing.30
Located near Buffalo’s steel mills, Barcalo had been best known for metal beds, porch furniture, and hand tools. But its management appreciated Lorenz’s passion for human factors. After brass and steel bedroom furniture went out of fashion, Barcalo had turned to making hospital beds. Some of these had cranks to raise the back and knees, achieving an optimal relaxing position, the lazy W, for recovery from surgery.
Lorenz was soon on the Barcalo payroll. In 1942, the company—like Thonet in Germany—produced reclining wheelchairs based on his patents. Immediately after the war’s end in 1945, Barcalo began to advertise a high-back version of this chair to furniture retailers as a rolling recliner (“more than a wheel chair—it’s luxurious comfort for the thousands of invalids and convalescents in your market area!”). A popular reclining lawn chair called the BarcaLoafer appeared in 1946.31
It took several years for Barcalo to begin producing upholstered chairs. Its license included all embodiments of Lorenz’s “floating in water” position, but it had no facilities for making living room furniture. Through Nathan Ancell of Baumritter & Company, a dynamic manufacturing and marketing organization that later became Ethan Allen, Barcalo looked for sublicensees. In January 1946, a maker of commercial and industr
ial seating, Ernest F. Becher, saw a German outdoor invalid chair—probably the Siesta—at a Chicago show. Becher’s company, Chandler Industries, was located across town in Buffalo from Barcalo. Becher, familiar with the principles of hospital beds, shared Ancell’s enthusiasm for the design, telling him that there would be a large market for a version suitable for the home. Ancell eagerly accepted the idea and arranged a license from Barcalo, which built the mechanism.
Becher may have done more than any other manufacturing executive to make possible the reclining-furniture boom of the postwar years. His specialty was automotive seating. In the 1930s, car makers were among the first businesses to appreciate a reclining angle; automobiles previously had straight backs that echoed the design of carriages. As a serious student of posture, Becher saw the opportunities of the principle developed by Luckhardt and Lorenz, and was so enthusiastic that he agreed to merge his larger company into Barcalo in 1947, becoming executive vice president for manufacturing as well as the largest shareholder. After the merger, the company introduced a series of reclining upholstered chairs called the BarcaLounger (the internal capital was later dropped) in autumn 1947, conservatively styled with an attached pillow. Unlike the BarcaLoafer, the BarcaLounger concealed its medical heritage. But advertising for both the Loafer and the Lounger proudly referred to the “floating in water” position.
Lorenz was not the only designer of the BarcaLounger. Graves and Becher also retained another Buffalo furniture man, Waldemar Koehn. Koehn had been president of the Sikes Company makers of premium leather executive chairs. Traveling to Washington, D.C., Becher and Graves obtained government specifications for a high-back chair with a head roll, a variation of what decorators call a Lawson armchair. This design, developed by Koehn, became a series of Barcaloungers upholstered in full-grain leather and in plastics; the federal government and commercial furniture dealers bought it enthusiastically, encouraged by veterans of the Sikes sales force. Soon other reclining-chair makers, including La-Z-Boy and Berkline, also adopted the design. Symbolically, it evoked male authority figures like judges and cabinet secretaries; ergonomically it provided welcome support for the sitter’s head in the full reclining position. By the early 1950s, the classic image of the recliner was fully established: a white male executive, back from a hard day at the office, kicking back in his suit or his shirtsleeves, puffing at his pipe. Other makers had used similar themes, but Barcalounger advertised more broadly and consistently and created a new mix of the Convivial, Convalescent, and Cogitative. It promoted the chair as a Father’s Day gift. The appeal succeeded. Between 1946 and 1955, according to Barcalo Company estimates, an average of 30,000 Barcaloungers were sold each year.
FATIGUE AND RELAXATION
Advertising was not the only reason for the success of this heavy, expensive furniture. Part of its appeal was technical. The Lorenz design was the first to offer a built-in ottoman and a balanced, neutral position activated by the sitter’s motion rather than by knobs or buttons. Even more important was the growth of popular interest in relaxation. Health claims for chairs appeared as early as a 1927–28 La-Z-Boy brochure for the “Recline-Relax-Recuperate chair,” a well-padded, fully upholstered armchair promising a zone of blissful, invigorating repose: “the most soothing, healthful softness you have ever felt.” Addressing the Depression-era middle class, the best-selling popular psychologist of the day, Walter B. Pitkin, called for an “Easy Way of Life.” World War II reinforced the search for relaxation. As in the first war, the demands of both combat and civilian production pushed men and women to their limits, and the military sponsored crucial research in human comfort and fatigue to maintain morale and accommodate injuries. In England, Spitfire pilots returning from missions could lean back in Morris chairs. In America, one of the first ergonomic postwar recliners was designed by Marie LeDoux, the wife of an injured tank corps officer, with the help of a St. Louis upholsterer. It was introduced in 1947, the year of the first BarcaLounger, and was selling a thousand copies a month at $195 to $300 by 1949. According to The New Yorker, customers included Charles Boyer, Betty Grable, Ida Lupino, James Mason, and Eleanor Roosevelt. (Like Anton Lorenz, Marie Le Doux had an unorthodox background in physiology—in her case, limited to a course in a chiropractic hospital in Los Angeles. In civilian life, her French-born husband was a professional mind-reader. The chair was later produced under the Craftmatic brand until the 1990s.)32
Just as the pace of industrial work in the early twentieth century inspired desk chairs that promoted an optimal upright posture, the beginnings of an information economy made people more conscious of their leisure. Barcalo successfully courted physicians, who recommended and even prescribed its chairs. A 1951 article, “Learn to Relax,” in Today’s Health, recommended stretching out on a couch or bed with the head supported by a pillow: “You relax by letting yourself go limp. If you shift or fidget, speak unnecessarily or lie stiff and uncomfortable, you are not relaxing.” Two years later, another writer in the same magazine recommended “muscular ease,” recommending that readers emulate “a youngster lying on his back, gazing pleasantly into the sky a blade of grass between his teeth,” keeping limbs “as limp and soft as possible,” and banishing all thoughts from the mind. (Yoga, zazen, Transcendental Meditation, and other Asian mind-body techniques reached the Western mainstream only later.)33
Hygienic relaxation was not, of course, the only influence on postwar reclining-chair design. Suburban living was equally powerful. While most of the detached houses in new developments were modest by present U.S. standards, they gave former apartment dwellers additional space for furniture. Dens and family rooms were gaining in appeal. With motorization and air conditioning, front porches disappeared, but there was ample garden space for outdoor reclining seating. The outstanding outdoor-indoor chair of the postwar years was the Barwa, designed and at first made by Edgar Bartolucci and Jack Waldheim in Chicago. It consisted of a cloth cover stretched on an aluminum frame; the user could either sit upright or recline with feet above head by shifting his or her weight. (The chair could rest stably in two different modes, thanks to the ingenious geometry of the frame.) Like the even more popular but far less comfortable Hardoy (butterfly) chair, the Barwa came to represent a new informal spirit in living and entertaining. This attitude affected high design as well; Charles and Ray Eames studied seating preferences and produced a lounge chair for Herman Miller with a rosewood shell and leather cushions filled with feathers and down. Charles Eames promised “the warm, receptive look of a well-worn first baseman’s mitt,” and generations of owners have paid substantial prices for that appearance and feeling.34
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, seating equipment and sitting habits reinforced each other, just as sneakers and the fitness movement were to do in the 1970s and 1980s. But while medical doctrine and popular culture alike had long recognized the value of exercise, the middle years of the century were especially keen on therapeutic lounging. By 1955, a Life magazine article on leisure gave as its first answer to the question “How Does the American Relax?”: “He collapses.” Lying down, the editors continued, once was restricted to the outdoors and the bedroom. Now “the growing informality—and fatigue—of modern life” had made it ubiquitous. With family members and cocktail guests alike, Americans were lifting their feet above their heads “or lolling in an elongated basket like an oyster on the half shell.” Even alone, Americans had embraced horizontal listening and reading. To clinch its point, the editors illustrated thirteen common types of lounging furniture. There were BarcaLoafer-style lounge chairs for small children and even a “dog couch.” In 1964 a satirical writer in the New York Times Magazine foresaw “the end of the chair as we know it,” as Americans (unlike Europeans) sought ever more horizontal positions and new domestic arrangements like conversation pits. Except at crowded gatherings, Americans were putting their feet up and letting their spines slide down.35
THE RISE OF AN INDUSTRY, THE FALL OF AN IDEAL
Recli
ners still faced challenges. Like the original La-Z-Boy the Barcalounger was expensive, even covered in Naugahyde. A skilled workforce assembled it as upholsterers had worked for centuries. Inserting the mechanism complicated the job—and taught the industry to work with more precision, because the tolerances of the metal parts could be highly sensitive—but in the end, a skilled workman upholstered one chair at a time.
Expense was not the only problem. Americans loved to recline, but ever since the waning of patented steel furniture in the 1890s they had resisted having machinery in their homes. And early Barcaloungers were big. Lorenz himself was over six feet tall and developed his mechanisms and prototypes accordingly though Barcalo eventually offered smaller models. Early mechanisms were bulky too, and needed ample space within the chair’s frame. Add this to the patriarchal image of the high-back chair that inspired many early designs, and women’s hostility to postwar recliners becomes understandable. To many, it seemed an intrusion and an aesthetic blot in the living room. Even later variants that could be placed within a few inches of a wall took up six feet of space when extended. Because reclining furniture gets up to six times as much wear as conventional chairs and its construction complicates reupholstery 1950s and 1960s models often used tough vinyl fabrics, many of which nevertheless discolored. Men loved recliners as soon as they tried them, but women controlled the selection of decor, so manufacturers did their best to assure them that they, too, would love sitting in the chairs.
As recliner sales grew, manufacturers looked for ways to increase production and lower prices. La-Z-Boy’s 1941 plant, leased for aircraft parts manufacture, resumed assembly-line production, but it still could not match Barcalo’s output. Morris Futorian, a Russian-born Chicago furniture maker, met Lorenz and licensed his reclining chair ideas. Lorenz had sold exclusive rights to Barcalounger, but controlled other patents that had been seized by the Alien Property Office during the war because of his joint ownership with the architect and German national Hans Luckhardt. He licensed these to Futorian. Barcalo executives felt betrayed but took no legal action.
Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity Page 21