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Chair Design Through History

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Chair Design Through History 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.
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