I like furniture. Especially chairs. Yes: Chairs. I know, it’s kinda niche, but I’m not alone in this borderline obsession. Outside of the chair designer legends like Hans Wegner, Finn Juhl, Arne Jacobsen, Charles Eames etc, many famous designers from various disciplines have a soft spot for them, some even designing era-defining classic chairs themselves.
These include industrial designers such as Dieter Rams and Marc Newson (of Apple Watch fame), to architects from the mid-century period to the modern day, such as Alvar Aalto, Ron Arad, Le Corbusier, Zaha Hadid and Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe. Even Salvador Dali found time for a couple of classic designs, collaborating with friend and designer Oscar Tusquets Blanca to create the Dalilips sofa and Leda chair.
I find chairs interesting for many reasons: other than clothes, they’re the item that we spend most our waking time in contact with. Because of this they play an important but often overlooked role in our lives. They have been described as architecture at a human scale and that seems to be a pretty good summation to me.
There are obviously many different chairs for many different applications but the design brief is generally the same. In order of importance, it must be:
Functional
Structurally strong enough to carry the load of a person and allow them to perform the task they need to carry out while in it;
Comfortable
This can vary depending on what’s required of the chair, eg, the duration the sitter will generally be expected to spend in/on it, and;
Aesthetically pleasing
This is obviously subjective and defined by things like fashion trends, available materials and/or technologies and the designer’s particular idea of what looks good. Because of this the variety is extremely wide ranging. Some, like the Bauhaus era fans, are purists and are all about function. Others go for style and elegance or even a visual, sometimes humorous, statement.
Other than a 2 x 2 metre corner seat for the garden (on which the models are shown in the image above), my only contribution to chair design to date has been twenty years’ worth of sketchbook doodles and these miniature models. I plan to make some full size, fully functional, chairs at some point. Exactly when that will be, I can’t say. One thing is certain — I won’t be bored in retirement.
