Now I Sit Me Down (20 page)

Ant Chair (Arne Jacobsen)

It was a member of the older generation who made a major breakthrough in molding plywood. In 1952, Arne Jacobsen, needing a stacking chair for the workers' canteen of a pharmaceutical headquarters, and inspired by the Eames molded plywood chair, designed a light three-legged side chair. The legs were steel tubes, but the seat and back were made out of a single piece of molded plywood—the Holy Grail of chair design. Jacobsen used nine extremely thin veneers and added an inner cotton layer to provide additional reinforcement. Like the Eames DCM chair, the Ant Chair had an insectlike silhouette. Four years later, it was followed by a four-legged version—the Series 7 chair. The Fritz Hansen company, with whom Jacobsen developed the chairs, produced the Series 7 in several versions: various wood veneers; lacquered, painted, and upholstered; with arms; as a barstool; and as a secretarial chair on casters. The chair flexes pleasantly when you sit on it. My first commission as a young architect was an office interior for a Montreal distributor of high-end cosmetics. I wasn't knowledegable about interior design, but the Series 7 chair—already more than a decade old—caught my fancy. I used it throughout: secretarial chairs, oak veneer chairs in the conference room, and upholstered armchairs in the executive office. The two chairs in the reception area were mustard-colored Ant Chairs. I bought an oak veneer Series 7 for myself. That and a pair of Aalto stools were my first designer chairs.

Danish Modern

The Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein has compiled a list of “100 Masterpieces” of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries from its collection. The Ant Chair is there; so are Thonet's café chair, Hoffmann's
Sitzmaschine
, and Rietveld's Red Blue Chair. There are two chairs by Mies, two by Aalto, three by Breuer, and six by the Eameses. Wegner earns only one entry, the three-legged shell chair, a very good chair but hardly his most representative design. Moreover, the model in the Vitra collection is an early version, without seating pads and finished in bright red varnish. One senses that this is an attempt to characterize Wegner as “innovative” and “sculptural,” the sine qua non of modernist chair design. The truth is that Wegner's work fits awkwardly in the modernist canon. He was innovative when he had to be, but his work was not driven by innovation, and while the shell chair undoubtedly has plastic qualities, most of his chairs look like chairs, not sculptures.

Wegner's approach to design was a result of his temperament and background—a contemporary described him as “the most gifted carpenter the world has ever known”—but he was also a man of his time. He benefitted from the Danish woodworking tradition without being hobbled by it, and he built on the foundation established by Kaare Klint without being merely a disciple. And his work suited the postwar zeitgeist. The American public especially was ready—eager, in fact—for something new. In the prosperous 1950s, innovation was in the air, changing the way that people traveled, worked, played—and lived. The open plan of the popular one-story ranch house encouraged a more casual lifestyle that called for lighter, simpler furniture. At the same time, the somewhat clinical designs of orthodox Bauhaus modernism had limited appeal. Wegner's furniture leavened modernity with craftsmanship, combined simple, undecorated forms with the tactile pleasure of natural materials, and did not sacrifice the traditional virtues of good furniture: comfort and utility.

Wegner was part of what became known as the Danish Modern design movement. Danish Modern included a variety of domestic products in addition to furniture: printed fabrics, pleated paper lamps, turned teak bowls, stainless-steel tableware, sterling silver coffee pots. A big part of the appeal was the integration of art, craft, and industrial design, all demonstrating a consistently humanist sensibility. Danish brands such as Fritz Hansen, Louis Poulsen, Royal Copenhagen, and Georg Jensen were recognized internationally. A 1959 photograph taken in Georg Jensen's Manhattan showroom on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of Wegner's furniture shows Wegner and Charles Eames seated in Wegner-designed chairs. The Dane is explaining something in an animated fashion, and Eames, dapper in a bow tie, is listening intently. The subject of their conversation has not been recorded, but what else could it be? Chairs.

The following year, the Metropolitan Museum held an exhibition titled “The Arts of Denmark.” Although the wide-ranging displays—designed by Finn Juhl—covered historical periods from the Vikings to the nineteenth century,
The New York Times
declared that the “star of the show” was contemporary Danish design. In passing, the reviewer referred to the “short but happy reign of ‘Danish Modern,'” for it was already evident that the popularity of the style was waning. Rising labor costs had made “industrialized craftsmanship” expensive and had led to cheap knockoffs that lacked the originals' quality and attention to detail. Moreover, the period saw the rise of a brittle Pop Art sensibility that favored plastics, geometrical forms, and bright colors, and made soap-treated oak and woven paper cord seem downright quaint. In a word, fashion had changed. An indicator of the depth of the change was that in 1966 the four-decades-old Copenhagen Cabinetmakers Guild exhibition finally closed. An era had ended.

Hans Wegner did not stop designing furniture. He worked with smaller furniture makers such as PP Møbler, which catered to a select clientele. By the time Wegner retired in 1993 (he died in 2007), he had designed more than five hundred chairs, ranging from the quixotic Valet Chair to everyday armchairs for the Danish ferry system, from stools to upholstered sofas. The three-shell lounge chair led to a series of commodious easy chairs that reflected his growing conviction that sitting comfort over extended periods of time required freedom of movement and the ability to change positions. Wegner favored a relaxed posture halfway between sitting and reclining. The story is that he had the idea on a beach, while making himself comfortable in a bowl-shaped depression in the sand. This insight resulted in one of his most unusual designs, a generous lounge chair that used eight hundred feet of halyard, or nautical rigging line, stretched—not woven—on a tubular stainless-steel frame. The uncharacteristically industrial image of the chrome-plated and painted steel was softened by the natural flax line, a colorful canvas headrest, and a loose, long-haired Icelandic sheepskin. There is nothing minimal or ascetic about this chair, which is luxurious, theatrical, and sybaritic, not traits usually associated with modern design. It also shares a quality with all of Wegner's creations: it is inviting. “A chair is only finished when someone sits in it,” he once said.

Flag Halyard Chair (Hans Wegner)

 

TEN

Fold and Knockdown, Swing and Roll

Hans Wegner designed several folding chairs that resemble steamer chairs although they are meant for indoor use. The Fireplace Chair—a wood frame with woven leather—supports a fully reclined posture, folds flat, and can be hung on the wall when not in use (it is intended for apartment dwellers). In another folding chair, the rear legs are on wheels, which allows the chair to be trundled around like a wheelbarrow. The best-known—and most copied—Wegner folding chair is a sort of collapsible Barcelona Chair, a low lounge chair of oak and woven cane. It even has handles, to assist in hanging it on the wall.

Chairs have always been associated with mobility. The idea of a portable, part-time seat dates back to the Egyptian folding stool and recurs throughout history: the Scandinavian folding stool, the Cretan camp stool, the Roman curule, the medieval faldstool, the Renaissance scissors chair. The pinned X-frame is the basis for all these chairs, as it is for deck chairs, director's chairs, and Wegner's folding chairs.

The X-frame folding chair can be sat on so the fabric is slung either side-to-side or front-to-back. The ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Etruscans used front-to-back. The Romans followed this practice, although when they developed the curule, they effectively turned the chair ninety degrees so that the fabric was stretched side-to-side, which influenced the faldstool, the scissors chairs, and the modern camp stool. When the Chinese adopted the folding stool—the “barbarian bed”—they used the Egyptian sitting mode, front-to-back. In the tenth century, when chair-sitting took hold in China, a back and armrests were added, turning the stool into a folding chair—the
jiaoyi
.
1
The two front legs of the
jiaoyi
curved up to support a horseshoe-shaped back rail, which extended forward to form armrests, an original design that was considerably more sophisticated than any chair found in Europe at the time. Although the sinuous curves anticipate the bentwood chair, the wood was not steam-bent but carved—the back rail consisted of several pieces, the joints reinforced by metal bands. The back rail was further supported by an S-shaped splat, and the seat itself was either woven rope or a solid mat. Ceremonial versions were slightly taller with an attached footrest.

Judging from scroll paintings, Chinese folding chairs were used indoors as well as outside. Unlike the folding stool, which was a utilitarian sort of device, the
jiaoyi
was a prestigious seat, offered to distinguished visitors as a matter of courtesy. Folding chairs were also used as ceremonial seats and thrones. Surviving folding chairs are beautifully carved and ornamented; a set in the Forbidden Palace is finished in black-and-gold lacquer. While decoration might be more or less elaborate, the basic design did not change for several hundred years. A seventeenth-century offshoot had a steeply reclined back, a headrest, and long protruding arms. Since upper-class Chinese tended to sit upright, such slouching was considered inelegant, which may be why this chair was called
zui weng yi
, the “drunken old gentleman's chair.”

Jiaoyi
, Chinese folding chair

It is likely the Chinese
zui weng yi
that was the model for a series of later European folding chairs. The British steamer chair, which originated in the late nineteenth century, supported a similar semireclined posture. The steamer chair was all wood; the less expensive “deck chair” had a canvas sling seat. Such chairs were common at seaside resorts but, as the names suggest, probably originated as outdoor chairs on ocean liners.
2
The
Titanic
carried six hundred steamer chairs, made of beechwood with slatted backs, woven rattan seats, and a hinged footrest that extended and turned the armchair into a chaise longue. This was the model for Kaare Klint's elegant oak-and-cane steamer chair, which improved the design by having the footrest slide out of the way when not in use. Klint also added a padded headrest.

My own deck chairs are of the simple wood-and-canvas variety that you still see in London parks. These chairs are tall enough to provide support for the head, and the backs can be adjusted to be more or less reclined; they come with and without arms. Although the deck chair is not a perfect chair—there is no lumbar support, and if I sit in it a long time the front rail cuts into my thighs—it is light and portable, and makes up for its limitations in convenience, folding perfectly flat when not in use. It is also inexpensive. The frugal Ludwig Wittgenstein furnished his rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, with a pair of deck chairs. Were they gaily striped? I don't know, but I like to think that they evoked happy memories for the severe philosopher—as mine do for me: summer holidays at the beach, reading on the lawn, drinks at sundown.

The deck chair was associated with increased leisure time. Activities such as hunting, fishing, and hiking required folding furniture of a different sort—so-called camp furniture. In 1877, a British inventor, Joseph Beverley Fenby, received a patent for an unusual camp chair. The clever design consisted of interconnected X-frames onto which a canvas sling could be hung. The Fenby Chair (also called the Paragon Chair) did not require assembly but was simply unfolded; it was transported in a compact carry bag. The Harrods catalogue described the Fenby as “the most Portable Chair in the Market.”