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-late- 1800s#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 (1885- 1947) 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 throne- like 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 Panton Chair, 1968-1999 plastic stacking chairs just like the Design: Verner Panton tubular steel pioneers of the 1920s. 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.' From email, texting and the internet, to mobile phones, PDAs, DVDs, search engines 2000s 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.

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 hand- crafted 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. 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.