Bowl: a Chair for Freedom
Bowl: A Chair for Freedom By Adélia Borges Six decades ago, chairs would rigidly dictate the way people should sit on them. Users had just one option: to sit up straight. The 1951 Bowl Chair arrived to shake up this scene. Man no longer obeyed the object; now the object would obey man, according to their movements and desires. Far from limiting or constraining users, it would free them. Freedom is a key word in the ideas and trajectory of the chair’s creator, Lina Bo Bardi, and an everyday practice in her plural activities. In all the dimensions of her work, more than technique or aesthetics, she was interested in serving human beings. ‘True architecture is a total process, embracing human beings’ economic, political and social relationships,’ Lina wrote. ‘Surely beauty, a beautiful form, is capable of consoling man. Poetry in form is vital. However, without architecture’s social sense, all of this gets lost. Man is the ultimate objective of architecture.’ The Bowl Chair illustrates this enunciation perfectly. The poetry in its essential form comes to the forefront at first sight. It can be summed up as a shell deposited on a tubular frame. These two pieces are loose, superimposed without any means of fixation. ‘What is new in this piece of furniture, what is absolutely new, is the fact that the chair can achieve movement from all sides, with no mechanic means whatsoever, only due to its spherical form. There are no other pieces of furniture of this kind,’ Lina wrote about her Bowl Chair. Innovation was evident, so much so the chair was featured in a cover story in the renowned American magazine Interiors in November 1953, sixty years ago – a notable feat, considering Brazil was, at that time, regarded as a peripheral country in the design arena, with its creations usually destined to invisibility, the opposite of what was happening in centers of power such as New York, London, or Milan.
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