Chair City.

Ross Harley

In theory, people can sit on just about anything. In practice, most of us pull up a
chair.

Not many agree what makes the perfect chair. Anyone who has been to a design
warehouse recently will testify that such an ideal is virtually impossible to define.
Should it be padded, moulded, wooden, metal, plastic, four-legged, three-legged,
bendy, rigid, vertical, reclining, plain, ornate, brightly patterned, minimal, modern,
postmodern, antique, mass-produced, a one-off, swivelling, folding, built to last, or
built to last about five minutes?

Comfort and style are high on everyone’s list. Ultimately however, the physical,
aesthetic, and cultural values we find in the modern chair are not based on
function. They’re more about expression, about how we feel even before we sit
down. Comfort’s a matter of meaning and symbolism as well as shape, material
and touch. No amount of ergonomic measurement can save an stupid piece of
twisted metal and foam.

The chair remains one of the few everyday objects that encapsulates the entire
spectrum of design. Beautiful to look at or lethal to sit on, the chair conveys the
essence of a period’s style.

According to British architects Alison and Peter Smithson, “the act of making
territory starts with our clothes. With a chair we extend our sense of territory
beyond our skin. It could be said that when we design a chair, we make a society
and a city in miniature.” Around the chair, new buildings are built.

Unlike watches, pens, shoes or other more decorative functional objects, the
chair suggests a certain approach to space and drama. The principles of
construction, gravity, and engineering are held together by a few strips of leather,
metal joints, moulded timber or extruded plastics. To make a chair is to recast all
ideas of functionality anew.

If the history of modern architecture coincides with that of the modern chair, we
could say that chairs are the only complete work of architects like Walter Gropius,
Le Corbusier, Gerrit Rietveld, Charles and Ray Eames, Eileen Gray, Zaha Hadid,
or Marcel Breuer. While modern urban planning has headed straight down the
road of failure, the chair remains the only structure of habitation that has truly
undergone a complete and successful revolution.

A perfectly controllable minimal structure, the chair offers countless opportunities
to modify morphology in the name of design. Its shape, material and dimension
convey the modern designer’s signature. No wonder every architect wants to cut
their teeth on a chair.

Some chairs are instant classics, like Danish designer Arne Jacobsen’s free-form
stacking chairs. In production since their debut in 1955, these all-purpose
multicoloured moulded plywood chairs can still be spotted around many a public
or private dining table.

The upholstered bent plywood chairs of Melbourne’s Grant Featherston (known
as the Contour range) have also been available since the 50s. Like Peter
Makeig’s Descon label , which manufactured very successful copies of Eames’
moulded plywood chairs in Sydney during the 50s, Featherston struck a chord
with the modern desire for abstract elegance and plain old-fashioned comfort.
Sydney architect Douglas Snelling’s rectilinear Line chairs, characteristically
upholstered in parachute webbing since the 40s, are also perfectly functional and
‘non-obstructive’. With such chairs, small domestic interiors breathe a little easier.

Iraqi Zaha Hadid’s amorphic furniture depicts fantastic silhouette cities in
miniature. Her work is about a particular way of seeing space, and the long
sweeping lines of her 80s chairs are part of her challenging, if slightly
unbuildable, architectural project.

Britain’s post-industrialist Ron Arad has made jokey but comfy
machines-to-sit-in by incorporating the leather car seat of a Rover. This early 80s
crossing of boundaries brought the support and sumptuousness of the
automobile into the immobile space of the lounge.

Such novelty was toyed with earlier by Italian designers like Achille Castiglione.
His high-tech tractor seat stool for example (produced during the late 50s) can be
seen as a pop industrial response to the artist Marcel Duchamp’s controversial
readymades. A more recent revival of the idea can be found the in mountain bike
seats stools that sometimes populate fashion stores.

Of course, asking designers to stop coming up with novel chair designs is a bit
like asking pop stars to stop making records and movies. I often think of all those
media moments that have heightened the popularity and significance of the
designer’s chair beyond a small coterie. Images of French filmmaker Jean Luc
Godard sitting on a Harry Bertoia wire mesh chair, of Robert Taylor bouncing off
a springy Saarinen womb chair in the 50s Hollywood film “Rogue Cop”, or of
Santa Claus ho-hoing in an Eames chair for a 50s Coca Cola ad helped bring the
modern chair to a mass audience.

Today a similar status has been granted Sydney- (now Paris-) based Marc
Newson’s aluminium Lockheed lounge, which recently starred in Madonna’s clip
for her song “Rain”. What better way to elevate Newson’s one-off shiny smooth
aluminium torso to the level of unattainable cult status?

As Danish furniture designer Hans Wegner put it, sitting is basically a
compromise between standing up and lying down. Though there will remain
many who’d rather sit on the ground than suffer the occasional undignified
compromise of a modern chair, the designer will without doubt continue to find
novel and imaginative ways for us to park our seats.