B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

Few objects have attracted so much attention from so many designers as the chair. Perhaps only the bicycle and the corkscrew have gone through such questionable variations, modifications and reinventions in ever-more excitable attempts to make a new and distinctive solution for a problem that has already been solved so often.

It’s not hard to see why designing a successful chair would appeal to a designer. To have a chair with your name attached to it confers a certain professional longevity, in a way that so few categories of design make possible. To work on the design of a smart phone or a laptop is to see your efforts fade into irrelevance heartbreakingly quickly. Chairs last, both as physical objects and as designs. They continue in production for much longer than almost any other kind of industrially made artefact. Or at least, they used to. A version of the bentwood café chair that Michael Thonet first made in 1859 is still in production today, many millions of examples later. The Eames Lounge chair, first commercially manufactured in 1956, is still made by Herman Miller in America, and by Vitra in Europe, with scores of unauthorized pirated versions in China. At the end of the 1950s, Ettore Sottsass suggested that Eames had designed not so much a chair as a way of sitting. It looks as modern now as it did then. That is not something that can be claimed for two other once equally charismatic designs from the same year, the Cadillac Coupe de Ville, with its flick-up chopped tail fins, or a Raytheon 405-line black-and-white television sitting on spindly legs. But there is evidence that the way in which we see the chair is changing too. It is being forced closer to the fashion cycle by the relentless search for novelty that has overtaken the way that design is consumed.

Peter Smithson, one of the few architects of the 1960s with a sophisticated understanding of design, believed that the continuing charm of the chair for people who are not designers came down to its cute, anthropomorphic looks. ‘People rarely collect cupboards or dressing tables, or stools, but to collect chairs is common. It is probable that we see them as domestic pets; they have legs, feet, arms, and backs. They are symmetrical in one direction, like animals, or like ourselves.’ I had never seen them quite like that. Some chairs you want to own because you want to sit in them. Others, the Rietveld red blue chair, for example, or at least the version I have, made by Cassina in Italy, who acquired the licence to manufacture it after Rietveld died, are better to look at from the other side of the room than to sit in. And the Ron Arad Rover chair in my study is a reminder of a particular moment at the beginning of the 1980s when Arad’s career was just getting started on the basis of creative salvage and I got to know him.

According to Smithson, ‘the act of marking territory starts with our clothes, with their style, with our gestures and postures when we wear them. With a chair we extend our sense of territory beyond our skin. With a chair we first impose ourselves on blind space.’ In an echo of Ernesto Rogers’s endlessly quoted editorial in Domus magazine from 1946 that described architecture as extending ‘from the city to the spoon’, Smithson went on to suggest that ‘It could be said that when we design a chair we make a society and a city in miniature. Certainly this has never been more obvious than in this century. One has a perfectly clear notion of the sort of city and the sort of society envisaged by Mies van der Rohe.’

Smithson and his partner, Alison, best known for their monumental blocks of workers’ housing in London’s East End, made several attempts to design distinctly un-proletarian chairs. They came up with a sequence of curious objects, including the Pogo chair, with flat, transparent Perspex sheets lashed to a metal frame, the Saddle chair, which had Barbarella-style nylon fur, and, perhaps more convincingly, the Trundling Turk, which had some of the colour sense and spatial qualities of Gerrit Rietveld’s red blue chair. Rather than Rietveld’s weightless, wafer-thin planes floating in mid-air, the Trundling Turk was a stack of massive foam blocks mounted on wheels. The Smithsons tried, but none of their chairs managed to define a historical moment in the way that the Thonet factories did. In the end, they were perhaps better at architecture than they were at design.

The chair has to be understood as a utilitarian object, and yet, because it has such a long history, one that is so closely associated with so many purposes that go far beyond utility, it has also acquired cultural significance. It has come to embody power and status. The chair has also become a research test bed, putting new materials to work, from bentwood to tubular steel, fibreglass to carbon fibre, and for the shifting manufacturing techniques that they depend on. The impact of technological and aesthetic innovation leaves its traces clearly inscribed in the form of the chair.

It’s no wonder then that the history of modern design is so often told as a sequence of chairs rather than of cars, or handguns, or typefaces, all of which could be plausible candidates for the role.

Furniture takes its aesthetic language from the spaces in which it is used, and for which it was originally designed. So a chair can be understood as the distillation of an architectural ideology. In the heroic period of modernism, architects designed a few key pieces of furniture, the cantilevered tubular steel chair, for example, mostly as a substitute for architecture, when they had no chance of realizing anything larger. Such objects were able to act as a kind of surrogate for an architectural approach to design and materials. When Charles Rennie Mackintosh or Rietveld designed chairs, they were encapsulating many of the qualities of their buildings.

Those designers who have managed to produce furniture of distinction have, with surprising frequency, aspired to a more exalted role in designing full-blown architecture. But there are significant differences, not least of scale, which make it a challenging transition.

Those chair designers who are not architects have produced pieces that have often lacked the visibility of the architect-designed canon. The exception to this, and to the dominance of a succession of architect chair designers, was Charles Eames, a man who, though he had trained as an architect and built one remarkable house and studio for himself, made his reputation with a series of chairs. That house, constructed in Santa Monica, embodied all that Eames and his wife, Ray Kaiser, believed in. Made mainly from off-the-shelf industrially produced glass and steel components, it was assembled rapidly like a kit of parts rather than built like a conventional house. Yet its delicate structure and spare proportions seemed to suggest some of the grace of a traditional Japanese house. It was the argument for an approach to design that embraced the modern world with economy of means.

In the summer of 1958, two years after the Eames Lounge first went on sale, Eames’s attorneys, Price & Heneveld, lodged his patent application for the side-flexing shock mounts that make the lounge chair so comfortable. The drawings have the deadpan authenticity of a specification for a scientific instrument. They seem to render the design as emotionless and objective rather than seductive or expressive. Every bolt and screw is carefully delineated in bold ink lines, and painstakingly cross-hatched. They show all thirteen screws, washers and bolts, on plan and in section, and in three dimensions. The drawings, lettered Figs 1 to 6, give a hint of the plywood curves on which the chair depends. And Eames’s name is charmingly added to the drawings in block italic capitals, beneath the word ‘inventor’. These patent drawings, though they are accurate and comprehensive depictions of the design, seem hardly to belong to the same century as the chair that they describe.

The last patent to protect the design was finally granted in 1961 - by which time Eames and his studio of not-always-acknowledged collaborators had been working on the project for the better part of two decades. The Lounge has its roots in a three-piece moulded-ply chair that goes all the way back to 1949. Charles Eames called it ‘appealingly ugly’. Its original Brazilian rosewood shells - an endangered timber species - were treading water in terms of technical innovation. His fibreglass shells had already made more of a new material. The cast aluminium he worked with later produced designs of extreme refinement. The Lounge chair turned its back on Eames’s ideas about affordability and democratic design that were embodied in his house. At a 2012 price of £5,000 with the stool, it is undeniably expensive. Manufacturing it is not easy, and involves a considerable amount of handwork. But despite all that, the Lounge is one of the handful of pieces of furniture that have served to define design in the twentieth century, suggesting that Eames did not always need to be consistent in his aims.

Design may have become something else since Eames produced his Lounge chair, but without getting the measure of what he did with furniture, it’s hard to get to grips with the direction that design has taken. It is the chair that has done more to penetrate the consciousness of the world beyond the design ghetto than any other object. It is the chair that seems most convincingly to suggest the idea of luxury and comfort in a contemporary way. And that was Eames’s intention. He wanted to create a chair that spoke of the creased, well-worn ease of a patrician East Coast club chair, with the lived-in appeal of a used soft leather baseball glove. Its buttoned leather upholstery shows off the tactile qualities of a material that ages with grace. Its cushions, which in the original version were filled with goose feathers, allowed for a pleasing degree of wear with time as they took on the imprint of those who sat on them.

The shape of the back of the chair, and its arms, depended on the development of the same moulded plywood, techniques that he had used elsewhere. But the Lounge was larger, heavier and considerably more complex. It took many attempts and many designers to refine the components into one seamless and poised whole.

Its launch by the Herman Miller company, with whom Eames worked for most of his career, was underpinned by one or two carefully polished myths. It is perfectly true that the Hollywood film director Billy Wilder owned one, and that he was photographed sitting in it. But it is not the case that it was designed specifically for him, as used to be claimed, and was occasionally hinted at by Eames himself. Wilder had been interested in Wiener Werkstätte furniture long before he became a film director. His apartment in Berlin had been designed by a Bauhaus graduate, and was furnished with Mies van der Rohe pieces. He knew Eames, but the chair was born long before they met.

While the human race’s headlong rush towards universal obesity may eventually lead to a reassessment of the proportions of the Eames Lounge, the act of sitting is unlikely to go the same way as listening to vinyl records, or buying newsprint. The chair as a category will still be relevant even into the distant future.

Chairs take us through a series of key technological episodes in the evolution of design. After carving, turning and joining wood no longer defined the parameters of chair design, the pace changed dramatically in the nineteenth century, when the Thonet family transformed furniture into a fully industrial process. Michael Thonet deskilled furniture-making by investing in machinery and inventing new techniques that could produce complex shapes without craft skills. He did for furniture what McDonald’s did for catering, though with more culturally nourishing results.

After bentwood, chair designers worked with another newly invented material, tubular steel, which became emblematic of the machine age. At the start of the 1920s, Marcel Breuer, Mart Stam and Mies van der Rohe, three of the modern movement’s key figures, all developed their own versions of the cantilevered chair using tubular steel within months of each other. In chair-design terms, it had the impact of electricity on lighting. Tubular steel could be bent into tight, springy curves, supplanting the conventional one-leg-at-each-corner format for the chair. There had been technically similar chairs before, devised by anonymous American engineers. But Breuer (one of the former Bauhaus students to become a master at the school), Stam and Mies were doing something else. They wanted to remake familiar domestic objects in radically new forms to make a point about the modern world. They might not be able actually to build utopia, but Stam could at least pay a plumber to knock up something that hinted at what a utopian machine age might one day look like, with the aid of nothing much more than a few feet of gas pipe.

Marcel Breuer made a much more polished chair for use at the Bauhaus, while Mies transformed the cantilever into a languid streak of glittering steel, pursuing a long arc across his travertine-and-glass version of classicism. Eileen Gray celebrated the poetry of mechanisms in her sparely elegant adjustable chairs, lights, tables and mirrors.

Charles Eames’s work spanned three of the technologies that transformed furniture in the twentieth century. He took moulded plywood into complex multiple-curved directions that went further than anything that Alvar Aalto had done with glued birch ply in the 1930s. Eames was also one of the first to use moulded fibreglass to create shell seats that were lighter and easier to form than plywood. And he worked with cast aluminium for the structure of his aluminium group seats.

After tubular steel and aluminium casting, chairs came to depend on a wide range of synthetic plastics and glass-reinforced fibre, rotational moulding and carbon fibre. The legend has it that Marcel Breuer was inspired by the handlebars of the Adler bicycle that he rode around the streets of Dessau, when he was at the Bauhaus, to use tubular steel for furniture. Plastics provided no such hints to the designer, and it required a more abstract form of intuition to see their potential. The plastics first used in making chairs were patented by Otto Haas in 1933 under the name Plexiglass. Haas’s company went looking for customers for a material that was tougher than glass, but equally transparent, wherever they could find them. Jean Prouvé used a single piece of Plexiglass as the seat and back for a perforated steel-frame armchair. Rohm & Haas made transparent body panels for a special version of a Pontiac shown at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.

Robin Day was able to use polypropylene for the shell of a cheap and robust stacking chair that was one of the most successful designs ever produced by a British designer. But both Eames and Day could use plastics only in a limited way, for the seat and back, not for structural legs or arms of a chair. Using a single material for an entire chair would transform the process of manufacturing, and create a truly mass-produced chair, with no handwork of any kind. That did not happen until the 1960s, with the use of injection-moulded plastics.

It was not just the technical problems that had to be addressed before plastics could be used to make anything but the most basic domestic furniture. Designers had to find a way to change the way that people understood and valued objects made from plastics. Plastic was seen as an ersatz substitute for a ‘real’ material. Its glossy surface revealed none of the signs of skilled workmanship or the preciousness of a material, which had become the conventional measures of the value of an object

Making the tool from which an extruded-plastic chair is formed is expensive and demands a high degree of skill, but that skill is not immediately obvious in the apparently effortlessly finished product. Making the chair itself is neither expensive nor skilled. The raw material is not obviously precious, and the extrusion process leaves no trace of the human hand.

If plastic was to become accepted as a material to make furniture with, ambitions that went beyond the narrowly utilitarian demanded the creation of a new aesthetic. It had to be an aesthetic based on a rejection of the traditions of handwork and conventional ideas of what constituted quality. It was an aesthetic that celebrated high-gloss finishes, and the magical quality of mysterious, enigmatic objects made instantly by a machine.

It is arguable that the Danish designer Verner Panton achieved the summation of all that was possible in the use of plastics as a material for making furniture in his most famous chair, first produced in 1968 in moulded fibreglass-reinforced polyester. It was a single fluid form combining back, seat and support, which was dramatically sculptural, and did away with all fixings. But it was not a commercial or a technical success until it was re-engineered by Vitra twenty years later. Italian designers and manufacturers did better. Joe Colombo’s 4867 chair for Kartell, designed in 1967, the first full-size stackable chair to be injected in a single mould, was more practical. It was followed by Vico Magistretti’s Selene chair for Artemide from 1968. These were designs that went further than Thonet’s bentwood and tubular steel in transforming the way that chairs were made.

Trying to record the evolution of contemporary design as a sequence of chairs now is like seeing history only through a close study of dynasties. There is still a lot to learn about design as a formal, technological and social issue from looking at certain chairs. But if design remained circumscribed by the chair, it would be fading into gentle irrelevance along with such other once vital, but now purely ornamental, skills as bookbinding or iron-forging. What makes design so endlessly fascinating is that it keeps shifting parameters and preoccupations. Design can be about inventing new shapes, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be about objects, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be about chairs, but it doesn’t have to be.