Now I Sit Me Down (22 page)

Ivar (IKEA)

I field-tested Ivar for a week as a dining chair. It was more comfortable than I expected, despite the flat seat. Or perhaps because of it? Galen Cranz, a Berkeley architecture professor who has written about the ergonomics of chairs, is a proponent of flat, uncontoured seats that allow more body movement than shaped seats. Sitting in the chair, I could feel the lower slat giving lumbar support and my upper back resting against the top rail. Not quite an Åkerblom curve, but close.

My wife kept asking me how long the IKEA chair was going to stay in the dining room. I had to admit that compared with our bentwood chairs Ivar was a clumsy fellow. You couldn't really blame him—he was made of white pine. Plentiful and easily worked softwoods such as pine were traditionally used only by country carpenters; joiners and cabinetmakers used hardwoods. Comparing white pine with beech (which is what our bentwood chairs are made of), it is easy to understand why. The compressive and bending strengths of beech are twice that of pine; beech is also four times harder. This means that a beechwood chair can be more delicate than a pine chair—hence lighter—and it will be more resistant to wear and tear. Beech is also more stable than pine, less likely to warp, and more amenable to carving. Finally, the surface of oiled or varnished hardwoods is visually richer. The reason that IKEA uses pine in its least expensive chairs is simply price; pine is two to three times cheaper than beech. On the other hand, a softwood chair's life expectancy is considerably shorter than that of a good hardwood chair, which can last for centuries. Poor old Ivar is unlikely to ever see the inside of a consignment shop.

Swing

Folding and knockdown chairs can be easily transported, but what about chairs that move in place? The first moving seats were not rockers, which we have already examined, but swings. The oldest representation of one that I came across was a clay figurine of a girl sitting on a swing suspended between two posts or trees. It was discovered in Hagia Triada, a late Minoan settlement dating from the middle of the second millennium
B.C.
Whether the figurine is a cult object or a toy is unclear, but the bench seat is immediately recognizable, as is the figure's familiar posture, two raised arms grasping the ropes.

There is something pleasantly aimless about sitting on a swing, although it does require concentration—you can't read, or eat, or doze off. Swinging is the closest thing to flying, the rush of air, the rhythmic movement, the ever-ascending arc. Swings, because they are so simple—a board and two ropes—appeared independently in many different cultures. Greek amphora paintings depict women on improvised swings—four-legged stools suspended from tree branches by ropes—a reference to the Dionysian Feast of the Swing. Pre-Columbian figurines depict children on swings, which is hardly surprising since the hammock was a Mayan invention. Old Chinese paintings show women standing on garden swings, and swing competitions were a feature of traditional village festivals in China and Korea. In Japan, the garden swing was probably a European import, for it was called
buranko
, the Japanese pronunciation of the Portuguese
balanco
.

Swings are popular on the Indian subcontinent, where they were introduced by the Mughals. Miniature Rajput paintings show women seated and standing on garden swings, singly and in pairs. Today, Indian swings, or
jhoolas
, come in a variety of sizes, as small as an infant's cradle or as large as a king-size bed, and are used inside homes as well as in gardens. According to a Gujarati friend, a key pleasure of a
jhoola
is the cooling breeze as it swings.

Indian swings, like the swings of antiquity, are associated with women. In a contemporary Indian novel,
Beyond Diamond Rings
by Kusum Choppra, one of the female characters wonders about this. “Isn't it curious that except for the trapeze artists, you never see men on swings? It is always women and girls who are on the swings, in the gardens, the public parks, the playgrounds, the private jhoolas at homes, everywhere, all the time, in art, in literature, in songs, in festivals, in the seasons, whatever.” She later concludes that it is the sense of freedom experienced on a swing that attracts women. “Up there, you are one with the clouds, the birds, and the air. Those velvet lined, gold chains around the ankles are left behind down there, somewhere, as you soar high on your imagination…”

There is something mildly erotic about a young woman lightheartedly swinging to and fro, hair and dress aswirl. Rococo painters certainly thought so, and young women on swings were a staple of artists such as Watteau. Eighteenth-century swings were not pushed but pulled—by a rope attached to the swing, usually handled by a young man. The back-and-forth movement of the swing—now tantalizingly close, now untouchably far—was a fitting painterly metaphor for the ritual of courtship. The great swing masterpiece was painted by François Boucher's pupil Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Originally titled
The Happy Accidents of the Swing
, the painting portrays a pretty young woman on a swing in a garden. Her elderly guardian—or perhaps spouse—is sitting on a bench behind her, pulling on the rope. Unknown to him, a handsome young admirer is hidden in the rosebushes. As the woman reaches the high point of her swing, she kicks up her leg with gay abandon, sending one pink shoe flying in the voyeur's direction, while he gazes rapturously up her billowing skirts.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who admired Fragonard, painted a woman on a swing, too. His version is almost the opposite of Fragonard's suggestive scene. The setting is a public garden in Montmartre, suffused in dappled light. A young woman is standing motionless on a low swing, engaged in intimate conversation with a man who may be courting her; perhaps he has just proposed. If so, he is not doing well, for she has turned away, seemingly embarrassed. In French, a swing is a
balançoire
, and her somewhat precarious posture appears distinctly
un
balanced, mirroring her indecision.

Had Renoir been American rather than French, and had he lived in a small town rather than a city, he might have set his painting on a porch and placed his model on a swing seat. Porch swings were—and are—an American fixture. They probably originated in the South, where the climate encouraged their use and “porch life” was a long-standing tradition. Like the
jhoola
, the southern swing was often couch-size. Like rococo swings, porch swings were associated with romance, specifically courtship. Swings were not used inside the house, but were sometimes used as beds on sleeping porches. Starting at the turn of the nineteenth century, New England sailmakers made swing beds called “couch hammocks,” which were deep, box-shaped settees made out of scrap canvas laced with rope. They were likewise used outside on porches, the high back and sides providing protection from the wind.

Lowcountry joggling board

Charleston, South Carolina, is a city closely associated with swings, because so many houses have verandas. That is where I first saw an unusual porch seat: the so-called joggling board. The seat resembles a very long bench—sometimes as long as sixteen feet—with a flexible plank, usually southern yellow pine, freely supported at each end, which allows the sitter to bounce up and down. Sometimes the supports are on rockers. The joggling board is supposed to have originated in the early 1800s on a Lowcountry plantation whose owner's sister suffered from rheumatism; the springy bench enabled her to exercise in place. I was told that in the past, courting couples would sit at opposite ends of the board, and as the bench bounced, they would slide closer together until they met in the middle. Think of what Fragonard could have done with that.

Roll

The other evening my wife and I saw
As You Like It
performed by a local theater company. The play contains Shakespeare's oft-quoted monologue “All the world's a stage.” The Seven Ages of Man made me think of the Seven Ages of Chairs: baby carriage, high chair, schoolroom chair, office chair, club chair, recliner, wheelchair. Our lives begin and end in chairs on wheels.

I have a photograph of myself in a stroller on Crossland Crescent in Peebles, Scotland, in 1945. I am two years old, slouched, asleep. The stroller is rudimentary: four wheels attached to a tubular steel frame with a seat and a push bar. The seat must be metal or some other hard material, for it is covered with a blanket. This type of baby carriage was descended from the perambulator, or pram, a late-nineteenth-century Victorian invention that was essentially a bassinet on wheels. Prams were large, elaborate, and expensive—I doubt that my parents could have afforded one on a second lieutenant's pay. A stroller, or pushchair, as the British called it, was a much cheaper alternative.

Owen Finlay Maclaren, a British aeronautical engineer, is the Thomas Edison of the stroller. During World War II, he was responsible for the design of the retractable undercarriage of the Spitfire fighter plane. After the war, Maclaren started a company that made aluminum aircraft parts, and also explored using the new lightweight material for consumer products. In 1961, he produced the Gadabout, a folding camp chair that is an updated—and simplified—descendant of the Fenby Chair. Four tubular aluminum X-frames support a fabric sling. This chair was the immediate precursor to his classic umbrella stroller. Maclaren had the idea when he saw his daughter, who was visiting from the United States with his first grandchild, struggling with a conventional baby carriage. He designed a collapsible pushchair that is basically the Gadabout on wheels. The tubular aluminum X-frames support a polyethylene fabric sling seat, and the whole thing, which weighs only six pounds, handily folds up into a compact bundle—like an umbrella. (Using a foot release lever, a person holding a baby can fold and unfold the stroller with one hand.) Maclaren's chair is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, but unlike most designer chairs it is not an aesthetic object but a tool, as functional as a fighter-plane undercarriage.

Umbrella stroller (Owen Maclaren)

Maclaren's stroller reminds me of an earlier child's chair. In 1760, Louis XV charged the great
ébéniste
Jean-François Oeben with an unusual commission: a special wheelchair. It was for the king's oldest grandson, the nine-year-old Duke of Burgundy, Louis-Joseph, who was unable to walk as the result of a recent accident—he fell off a hobby horse. Only this written description survives of Oeben's creation:

Delivered by le Seigneur Oeben, cabinetmaker, for the use of M. le Duc de Bourgoyne at Versailles, a mechanical armchair with springs, 30 in. wide and 30 in. high, rotating on a pivot and rising to a height of 5½ ft., covered with crimson damask with cushions in two sections and a third for the back, all in crimson, the head rest in the same color of damask, there is a footrest covered in red-morocco leather under which is a frame of polished iron containing six brass wheels which engage into a worm-screw, at the foot are three brass castors for rolling the chair and turning it in any direction. Note: Three wheels, two large and one small, have been attached to the chair to enable it to be taken out into the park, and a kind of swan-neck supporting a wooden canopy to which to attach curtains, and there is a table in cherry-wood.