Now I Sit Me Down (27 page)

Tugendhat Chair (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich)

The oldest design in the museum is Mies van der Rohe's 1927 cantilever MR10, his first tubular chair.
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It turns out to be reasonably comfortable, with a pleasant wicker seat and wicker-wrapped arms. Two years later Mies produced the Barcelona Chair; roomy, although the slumped position would be wearying over time, and since there are no arms, getting up is awkward. Mies's Tugendhat Chair, likewise designed with Lilly Reich about the same time, avoids that problem. Reich was an experienced designer, having worked with Josef Hoffman on several chairs. The Tugendhat Chair, a wide cantilever lounge chair with a tufted seat and well-padded arms, is less celebrated than either the MR10 or the Barcelona, but I would prefer it if I were sitting down to read a book. Like the MR10, it is extremely resilient—a bouncy chair. I'd always admired Marcel Breuer's handsome B35 lounge chair of that same era, but I had never sat on it, and I'm disappointed. Although both the seat and the arms are separately cantilevered there is not much resilience, and the top bar cuts into my back. Next I try Breuer's molded plywood chaise longue, influenced by Aalto and produced in England in the 1930s. It is more flexible, although unlike Dr. Pascaud's
Sur-repos
the confining arms do not swing open, so getting in and out requires ungraceful acrobatics. Not pleasant at all.

A small chair catches my eye. Upholstered in bright red hopsack, it looks like a furry amoeba. It's the 1940 Museum of Modern Art competition-winner designed by Saarinen and Eames; I'm not sure what it's doing here, since this reproduction is manufactured by Vitra, a Swiss company. When I sit on it, the laminated wood is slightly springy and the thinly padded upholstery provides firm support. A very nice chair, if somewhat small for me. There are several other Saarinen chairs on the floor. The classic Tulip Chair, with its wineglass base and fiberglass seat, is okay, although it strikes me as less than ideal for dining since it can't be pulled up to the table—it swivels instead. Yet it remains a popular chair. So does the deceptively simple 1950 Model 71 executive armchair, which was the chair that Niels Diffrient worked on as a Cranbrook student. Charles Eames judged the Model 71 to be Saarinen's “best functional piece.” Sitting in it I can see why. “Timeless classic” is a hackneyed term, but the Model 71 qualifies.

A nearby executive desk chair is so low-key I almost pass it by. Although the armrests are plastic, the plushy tufted leather looks inviting so I sit down. In some indefinable way, I feel immediately at home—a matter of the generous dimensions, a soft seat, and the cozy sense of being contained. The chair was designed by Charles Pollock in the 1960s, and is said to have taken him five years. “I mean, you just fiddle with it forever and run back and forth to the factory and talk to Mrs. Knoll forever until finally it just gels,” he told an interviewer. Pollock's fiddling produced a deceptively sophisticated design. The polished metal rim, which looks like a bumper rail, is actually an aluminum extrusion that forms the structure of the chair as well as providing a place to attach the upholstery and the back panel. What dates the design are the minimal controls—only chair height and tilt tension can be adjusted—but this chair doesn't need more.

Executive chair (Charles Pollock)

The 40/4 stacking chair (not manufactured by Knoll) was another innovative chair that appeared in 1963. Like Pollock, the designer David Rowland worked slowly and it took him eight years to complete the chair, which consisted of a frame of very thin bent steel rods supporting a contoured seat and a back made out of vinyl-coated sheet metal. The light chair—fourteen pounds—was intended to be a temporary seat that could be stored when not in use. The 40/4's unique feature was that forty of them could be stacked in only four feet—hence the name. Although intended as a temporary seat, it was comfortable and elegant enough to be used in recital halls and restaurants. Variants included armchairs, lounge chairs, writing-arm chairs, barstools, and outdoor chairs, with metal, wood, plastic, or padded seats. The 40/4 replaced the Eames shell chair as the iconic modern chair and became the bestselling designer chair of that epoch.
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The 1950s and '60s were exceptional decades in American furniture design. Like Saarinen's Model 71 and Pollock's executive chair, Rowland's stacking chair is still in production and still popular. But these chairs can hardly be called emblematic of our time, being more than half a century old. There are more recent chairs displayed in the Knoll Museum, but they are chairs whose time has come and gone: a fragile retro barrel chair designed by Richard Meier in 1982; an equally uncomfortable but more colorful armchair by Ettore Sottsass of the Italian design group Memphis, and three plywood side chairs by Robert Venturi that are fun to look at but definitely not fun to sit on. All are a reminder that nothing ages as quickly as a contrived chair.

40/4 stacking chair (David Rowland)

The Sottsass and Venturi chairs are emblematic of the brief postmodern episode, but like Hector Guimard's sinuous Art Nouveau furniture of the fin de siècle they are too idiosyncratic to have a long life. A similar fate may befall a line of chairs that Frank Gehry designed for Knoll in 1990. They are constructed entirely of laminated maple veneer strips less than a quarter-inch thick, bent into curves and glued together. The playful chairs, which recall bushel baskets, are extremely light, and the flexible material makes them comfortable to sit on. The chairs have some of the easygoing charm of a deck chair, although their laid-back casualness is deceptive. These are luxury products—you could get a dozen 40/4s for the price of a single Gehry side chair. But who can tell what the future holds? When Thonet stopped manufacturing tubular steel furniture in the late 1930s, few would have anticipated that the Wassily Chair would become the iconic chair of early modernism. It is quite possible that at some future date, the bushel-basket chairs will be judged to be the perfect emblems of our extravagant age.

Flip-Flops

I asked John Dunnigan what he thought would qualify as the emblematic chair of our time. In addition to being an experienced chairmaker, John heads the furniture design department at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is knowledgeable about the history of chairs and I knew he would have an interesting opinion.

Of course one has to first acknowledge that most of the chairs we think of as emblematic of their time were considered that in retrospect, which points out the difficulty of anyone doing that now for our time. And we know that art history and criticism are not impartial. Having said that, as strong as the celebrity designer chair market has been over the last thirty years, the chair that is most representative in my opinion is unquestionably the anonymous monobloc polypropylene chair. I've been fascinated by this chair for many years since I bought my first one at a supermarket in the 1980s. Versions of it are produced by companies around the world. It's a technical tour de force, a marketing miracle, a cultural phenomenon, and potentially an environmental disaster, which could be emblematic of our time, too.

The monobloc (meaning one-piece) chair to which Dunnigan was referring, sometimes called a resin chair, is the ubiquitous white plastic patio chair that sells for as little as ten dollars—your local supermarket probably has stacks of them.

Monobloc plastic patio chair

The Milanese journalist Marco Velardi, who edits
Apartamento
, an offbeat “everyday life interiors magazine,” gave the same answer when I asked him about today's emblematic chair. “It's not easy to define a chair of our time, but the first thing that came to my mind was a plastic chair. If I think of my childhood and the times I've traveled and visited places, and with that I don't mean fancy places that are trying to be fashionable or trendy, I think of plastic chairs, in their many shapes, simple or more refined, in cafés, airports, hospitals, offices, apartments.” My friend Andrew Morrison, who has designed several chairs for Knoll, as well as a long-lived open-plan office system, agreed. “The plastic chair is our major contribution to chair design,” he told me. “It got rid of all those damn joints. Whenever I see a television report about a terrorist bombing in the Middle East there are intact plastic chairs strewn all over the place. Wooden chairs would never survive the blast, they'd be splintered to pieces.” In the early 1960s, freshly graduated from Pratt Institute, Andrew, who already had a chair in production, proposed a one-piece fiberglass chair to Knoll. “Florence Knoll told me, ‘It's not for us,'” he recalls. “At that point injection-molded chairs didn't exist,” he said. “There were only two large injection machines in the United States, and they were making dashboards for Ford.”

The two first commercially produced one-piece plastic chairs appeared only a few years later, designed by Helmut Bätzner in Germany and Vico Magistretti in Italy. The challenge in making a chair out of thin plastic is not the seat—the Eameses had solved that problem—but the legs, which need to be rigid. Bätzner stiffened the legs by giving them an L-shaped cross-section; Magistretti used an S shape. The stacking side chairs were molded out of one piece of fiberglass-reinforced polyester, but they were relatively costly to manufacture and did not find a large market. It would be another two decades before the familiar mass-produced plastic patio chair arrived, made possible by advances in injection technology using cheap polypropylene rather than expensive fiberglass-reinforced polyester. The first injected plastic products were buckets, housewares, and automobile parts. It is unclear exactly who applied this technology to a one-piece chair—it may have been a French company.
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In any case, it was sometime in the mid-1980s, and the chair was definitely the brainchild of a plastics manufacturer, not a traditional furniture company.

The most common version of the monobloc chair has arms that extend around the rear to form a backrest and support back splats. In most chairs, these splats—fan-shaped, or otherwise patterned—are the chair's only ornamental feature. Splats are traditional, but the monobloc is not an offshoot of any particular chair—this is not a Kubleresque “replica.” The design is almost entirely dictated by the manufacturing process and the desire to minimize material. The plastic is thin—less than ¼ inch—and the arms and legs have ribs and L-shaped profiles to provide stiffness. The chair is so light that it can be stacked in piles of twenty or more. White is the most common color, but forest green and dark brown are also popular. And the material resists the elements. Resists all too well: broken plastic chairs litter the landscape.