Is there a single piece of furniture people use more, but think less about, than the chair? A brilliant piece of ageless technology designed to cradle the bum and support the back of a single person (as opposed to a backless stool or a multi-person sofa), humans probably spend more time in them than even their beds.
And yet, with the exception of people who suffer from a bad back or some other chronic lower-body problem that obliges them to consider their seat, people daily plop themselves down at the kitchen table for breakfast, and then into their cars, and then onto their classroom or office chair, and maybe pull up a seat in a restaurant or coffee shop, or lunge for a spot on the bus, and then return home to a dining-room chair and a living-room armchair, and then continue on obliviously until they lower their behinds onto the orphaned clothes-hanger of a wooden chair in the corner of their bedroom to remove their socks before retiring to bed and imaging that this is the first time all day long that a blessed piece of furniture has allowed them to take a load off.
Chairs, by Judith Miller, Conran Octopus, 338 pages, $80
Perhaps that's as it should, and always will, be. But with her book Chairs, Judith Miller, the British antiquarian and writer, gives us a chance to stop for a few moments and consider the luckless chair as a masterpiece of design and ingenuity that dates back to Ancient Egypt.
After a lengthy introduction to the history of her subject, Miller lays out 100 of her favourite chairs in chronological order with the help of full-colour photographs by Nick Pope. The result is a visual voyage through chair design from the 17th-century to the current one, with stops along the way that most readers will recognize: the Louis XV fauteuil with its green silk upholstering; the bentwood armchairs of the early part of the 19th century; the Danish masterpieces of the 1950s like the Swan, the Egg and the stackable Series 7; and the groovy swiveling ball chair of the 1960s.
The collection makes apparent an odd contradiction: that even though most people will live their entire lives without stopping to reflect on the chair, when they do they will realize that they'd noticed more of them than they realized.
Which is why a chair is still one of the most important pieces a designer can produce.
“A lot of chairs have become indoor sculpture,” the designer Terence Conran writes in a foreword to the book. “Certainly the general public are more aware of their chair design than their architecture. Sometimes I think that you are unlikely to be a successful architect or designer unless you have designed a classic chair.”
Frank Gehry, who designed the Wiggle in 1972 (see the photo gallery), would probably agree.
