chair design
through history
MA Design Management and Cultures
Zihan Zhao
What’s with all the chairs?
Throughout history, chairs have symbolized the life and times of a designers and consumers.
Like any work of art, we can learn about the culture they came from by looking at how they
were made, who made them, and their style. What was important at the time? Who were they
made for? What space did they used to inhabit? As art and architecture evolve over time,
chair design does too. But their purpose never has; for millennia people have needed a place
to sit. As such, the chair is a perfect marker for the ever-changing history of design.
Chairs combine form and function in a way that is easy for consumers to digest but
incredibly difficult for designers to perfect inasmuch as they encompass many of
the challenges of design-—engineering, material choice, production method, style,
and functionality—in one small package.
In many cases a designer’s entire philosophy can be summed up by their chair.
Designer George Nelson put it nicely, saying, “Every truly original idea—every
innovation in design, every new application of materials, every technical invention
for furniture—seems to find its most important expression in a chair.”
Late 1800s
Until the mid-19th century, most chairs were made by hand,
but the new industrialists were experimenting with modern
production techniques to manufacture high quality furniture
swiftly and cheaply in large quantities. Among the most
successful was the Austrian manufacturer Michael Thonet,
who pioneered the mass-production of bentwood furniture. By
the late 1800s, his simply styled chairs had become the first to
be used by both aristocrats and factory workers.
Side Chair No. 14, 1870
Bent, solid and laminated beech, woven cane
Production: Thonet, Austria
- See more at:
https://designmuseum.org/design/chairs-late1800s#sthash.MbQ1LV1y.dpuf
Late 1800s
Rocking Chair No. 1, 1860
Bent, solid and laminated beech,
woven cane
Production: Thonet, Austria
The popularity of the Arts and Crafts
movement encouraged the middle
and upper classes to regard rocking
chairs and other rustic styles of
furniture with a new affection during
the late 1800s. Despite its industrial
ethos, Thonet drew inspiration from
Arts and Crafts design in the styling of
its products. The company developed
its first rocking chair, the Rocking
Chair No. 1, in 1860. Sales were slow
at first, but Rocking Chair No. 1 and
subsequent rockers steadily gained
popularity and by 1913, one in every
twenty chairs sold by Thonet was a
rocking chair.
Early 1900s
The early 1900s was a period of continued experimentation in chair design.
Innovative designers and architects, such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Scotland
and Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann in Austria, strove to apply the geometric
forms and monochrome palette favoured by the fledgeling modern movement to
furniture and domestic objects. Made by hand in small quantities, their chairs were
mostly bought by wealthy bohemians, except for occasional special commissions
for public buildings such as Glasgow tea rooms and Viennese coffee houses.
High-backed chair for the Ingram Street Tea Rooms, 1900
Design: Charles Rennie Mackintosh by Oak
Among the earliest and most eloquent exponents of a modern spirit in British design was the Scottish
architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928). By fusing the influence of traditional
Celtic craftsmanship with the purity of Japanese aesthetics, Mackintosh defined a distinctive and highly
refined design style on the cusp of Art Nouveau, the Arts and Crafts Movement and central European
Secessionism. One of his most enduring clients was Miss Cranston, who owned a chain of tea rooms in
Glasgow and asked Mackintosh to design them. He designed the stark, geometric form of this high-backed
chair to contrast boldly with the white walls of the ladies’ luncheon room in the Ingram Street tea room.
Early 1900s
Armchair for the Purkersdorf Sanatorium, 1902
Design: Koloman Moser
As a designer of both graphics and furniture, Koloman Moser (1868-1918) favoured the
geometric motifs and monochrome palette which were to typify the work of the Wiener
Werkstätte, the influential craft workshops that he founded in Vienna with the architect Josef
Hoffmann in 1903. This armchair, which was considered as audacious in style by the Austrians
of the early 1900s as Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s angular furniture was by his fellow Scots,
was originally designed for use in the foyer of the Purkersdorf Sanatorium of which Hoffmann
was the architect. At the sanatorium, Moser’s armchairs were arranged in pairs around elegant
octagonal tables.
1920s
After World War I, progressive
designers could take advantage of the
emergence of new man-made materials
and production techniques to create
furniture in the glacially glamorous
aesthetic of the "machine age". The
decade was dominated by the race
to design the first cantilevered chair,
eventually won by the Dutch architect
Mart Stam, and by the experiments
in tubular steel of Marcel Breuer and
Mies Van Der Rohe in Germany, and
Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and
Charlotte Perriand in Paris.
Red / Blue Chair, 1918-1921
Design: Gerrit Thomas Rietveld
Beech, plywood
1920s
Barcelona Chair,
Model No. MR90, 1929
Design: Mies van der Rohe, Lilly Reich
Chromed flat steel, leather
Among the most elegant and imposing
of the chairs designed by Mies van der
Rohe (1886-1969) in collaboration with
the interior designer Lilly Reich (18851947) is the opulent Barcelona Chair.
Designed in 1929, it is one of the most
recognizable early 20th century chairs
and is still a familiar sight in corporate
foyers. The chair was developed for the
German Pavilion at the 1929 International
Exhibition in Barcelona as part of Mies’
commission to design the pavilion and
its contents. As the German Pavilion was
to be the setting for the official opening
ceremony, Mies decided upon a thronelike form for the chairs and modeled them
on the sella curulis, an ancient stool used
by Roman magistrates.
1940s
Developments in the design of domestic objects like the chair came to a
standstill during World War II and in the period of material shortages immediately
afterwards. Ingenious designers and manufacturers then harnessed the wartime
advances in materials and production processes by the defence industry for
consumer products. At the forefront of innovation were the US designers Charles
and Ray Eames and their collaborators on the West Coast, helped by empathetic
manufacturers such as Knoll and Hermann Miller.
Navy Chair, 1944
Design: Emeco
Aluminium.
Production: Emeco, US.
One of the best-selling chairs in North
America, the Navy Chair was designed
in 1944 specifically for use at sea by the
US Navy by the Electric Machine and
Equipment Company – known as Emeco –
and the Alcoa aluminium group. Emeco’s
founder, Wilson ‘Bud’ Dinges, was a master
tool and die maker and a skilled engineer.
He worked closely with Alcoa’s scientists
and naval engineers to develop and test the
Navy Chair. Having completed the design
in 1944, Emeco put it into production
at its manufacturing plant in Hanover,
Pensylvania where the Navy Chair is still
made today. Each chair is constructed by a
small number of skilled craftsmen, each of
whom is entrusted with a designated task.
1950s
After the horror of World War II, people longed for a warmer, organic aesthetic
of earthy colours and natural materials such as wood. The design champions
of this organic modernism - such as Charles and Ray Eames, Harry Bertoia and
Eero Saarinen in the US, Arne Jacobsen in Denmark, Gio Ponti and the Castiglioni
brothers in Italy - harnessed wartime advances in defence technology to develop
new furniture and products for the fast-expanding post-war population.
Series 7, Model No. 3017, 1955
For the 60 year anniversary of the Series 7™ two special
editions of the 3107 chair have been made. The chairs
have been designed both to stand out on their own, and to
complement each other. Contrasts are the keyword in the 60th
Anniversary Edition - it is all about contrast, both in materials,
surfaces and colours. The two chairs has been created with a
masculine or feminine perspective - as a deep dark blue shell
with powder coated legs in a burnished look and a pale pink
shell with gold-plated legs. While the deep dark blue and the
pale pink may contrast each other, they are also two colours
that when combined, both display a calming and elegant look.
Each piece comes with a golden plate mounted on the bottom
of the shell showing that it is part of the 60th Anniversary
Edition.
The two chairs are only available throughout 2015.
1950s
Tulip Chair, 1955-1956
Design: Eero Saarinen
Plastic-coated cast aluminium, moulded
fibreglass, upholstered latex foam.
Production: Knoll Associates, UK
The son of Eliel Saarinen, the eminent
Finnish architect who co-founded the
Cranbrook Academy after emigrating
to the US, Eero Saarinen (1910-1961)
emerged as an accomplished architect
and designer in his own right. Best
known for the TWA terminal building at
New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, he
is also famed as the designer of the Tulip
Chair. A friend of the Eames and Harry
Bertoia, Saarinen shared their zest for
harnessing the latest technologies to
create modern furniture in fluid, organic
forms. The Tulip is a fine example
although Saarinen was disappointed by
his failure – dogged by the limitations of
1950s plastics technology – to make it in
a single piece.
1960s
By the early 1960s a new generation
of designers were rejecting the solid
values of 1950s organic modernism
by experimenting with exciting new
materials, particularly plastics, to create
new furniture in vivid colours and fluid
shapes. The Danish designer Verner
Panton and the Italians Joe Colombo and
Anna Castelli-Ferreri raced to develop
plastic stacking chairs just like the
tubular steel pioneers of the 1920s.
Panton Chair, 1968-1999
Design: Verner Panton
Polypropylene – 1999 version
Production: Vitra, Switzerland
Sexy, sleek and a technical first – as the
first cantilevered chair to be made from
a single piece of plastic – the Panton
Chair epitomises the optimism of the
1960s. Inspired by the sight of a pile of
plastic buckets stacked neatly on top of
each other, Verner Panton (1926-1998)
had struggled with ways of constructing
a plastic cantilevered chair since the
1950s. When the Panton Chair was
finally unveiled in the Danish design
journal Mobilia in August 1967, it caused
a sensation. Equally memorable was its
appearance as a prop in a 1970 issue of
Nova, the British fashion magazine, in a
fashion shoot entitled “How to undress in
front of your husband.'
2000s
Repeat Sofa, 2002
Design: Hella Jongerius
Cotton, viscose, polyurethane foam,
stainless steel
Production: Maharam Textiles, US and
Paola Lenti, Italy
A concern of the Dutch designer Hella
Jongerius (1963-) is to imbue industrially
produced objects with the character
traditionally associated with handcrafted pieces. When commissioned
to develop an upholstery fabric for
Maharam, the US textile manufacturer,
she achieved this by manipulating the
repetitions in the pattern. Scouring
Maharam’s archive for motifs, Jongerius
replicated a series of dots, pixels,
pinpricks and dogtooth checks in the
form of the Jacquard cards, which are
punched with the data that programmes
the looms. Each pattern sequence
varies in length and is never repeated
before three metres to ensure that even
if several chairs are upholstered in the
fabric, each will look distinctive.
From email, texting and the internet, to mobile phones, PDAs, DVDs, search engines
and MP3 files, our daily lives are filed with new tools, systems and networks which
would have seemed inconceivable twenty years ago. These new technologies
have transformed the way we lead our lives and designers, such as the Bouroullec
brothers in France and Hella Jongerius and Jurgen Bey in the Netherlands, have
responded by developing new types of furniture.
More about chairs
In Western society, the chair has become integral to the notion of posture.
The new chair designers assuming responsibility in the current era are the
ergonomists. This group, emerging from the science and engineering fields
are attempting to apply their tools to understand the physiological, anatomical
and psychosocial factors that may lead to better chair design. To suggest, after
the long evolution of the chair and supported sitting in Western culture, that
we are still not quite sure how to best sit people, is an interesting question,
about which a great deal of ergonomic research has concerned itself.