Why the chair?
October 9th, 2008
What makes the chair the pre-eminent object in furniture design?
Red Blue Chair c. 1923 by Gerrit Rietveld.
Morocco
The pinnacle of the great art disciplines, it seems to me, is always where the medium interacts with the human form. Architecture is judged in its relation to human scale and how it interacts with patterns of human behaviour.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso.
Alberto Giacometti
The human figure has always been the zenith of drawing, painting and sculpture.
Kendi (pouring vessel)
Textiles have their ultimate form when draped on the human body. Ceramics are born of human utility.
So with the chair. Other furniture such as tables, desks and beds are informed by human dimensions but are ultimately simple planes. The chair (with its derivatives like the stool and bench) is the only object that is so intimately intertwined with the human body.
This places demands on the design that don’t exist with other furniture. The relationship is not limited to comfort and good posture. The designer may intend to convey many other feelings and impressions. The chair may be designed to keep the occupant alert or relaxed, to enhance or diminish their status, to be welcoming or dismissive, etc.
In any of these cases however it is necessary to design in the context of understanding the human form. Designing a new chair always requires a full scale (and sturdy) mock-up. There’s no other way to be certain that the finished object will meet the ergonomic goals. Of course the human form varies greatly. When making chairs for a client, the mock-up allows the designer to test their chair against the body of the user. Care must be taken here because what seems to work well on first taking a seat may not be comfortable after sitting for an hour or so.
My first step in designing my ‘Alumni’ chair will be to take some initial dimensions (based on experience and preference) and make a mock-up that will allow me to vary seat height and angle, and the placement and shape of the back and arm rests.
I’ll show some progress towards this in the next chair post.
Entry Filed under: Wood
3 Comments Add your own
1. Bill Stankus | October 14th, 2008 at 1:06 am
I recall a visit with Sam Matloof and he told a story of getting several ernest visitors in the 1950s. They were engineers - furniture engineers - and they were interested in his formula for making comfortable chairs.
Sam said he laughed and told them his ’secret’. He made chairs that were comfortable for himself - he figured he was of average size and if he was comfortable then other would also feel that way. He said he had no formula but they were free to measure angles and take measurements.
He really chuckled at this story.
2. Mark | October 14th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
A classic case of an objective world view versus a subjective one - or if you like, a rationalist approach versus a romantic one. As chair designers we each have to find our own accommodation within this dialectic.
It may be possible for Sam to pass on his method in one-on-one teaching but you can’t really disseminate knowledge widely without some degree of codification in numbers. It’s easy to say the chair feels comfortable to you but this glosses over how the chair was built in the first place. Is it based on an adjustable prototype or knowledge gained from years of trial and error?
On the other hand a chair is too complex to be reduced to a small set of numbers or a ‘formula’. Chairs vary so widely in their structure and purpose. A seat angle that works well for a comfortable reading chair will be quite inappropriate for a formal dining chair. If you take the example of a continuous arm chair (such as George’s Ming Chair) the ‘correct’ height of the arm will depend on factors like the angle of tilt of the arm (and for some chairs this may vary along the arm) and the distance of the arm from the sitter, ie the width between the arms. Do the forearms rest horizontally or are the wrists well below the elbows or somewhere in between?
My approach is usually to start with some guidelines such as the height and width of the seat, height of the lumber support, etc. These might usefully be expressed as a range. And then I adjust these variables for the specific design. And then I prototype, test and refine.
Unless we happen to know that the chair will be used only by a particular person, we always have to design for the average but allow for variation in form. Being of average size is certainly an advantage because you can test your chairs yourself.
Thanks for sharing your tale, Bill (and for the name-dropping!)
3. Wood-fired! » Alumn&hellip | July 12th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
[...] with my progress towards a chair for the Chairs of the Alumni exhibition. No updates (other than this general one) fortunately doesn’t mean no progress - although as always I wish I was further along the [...]
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