For years you yearned for one, then realized it wasn’t enjoyable to sit in once you actually got one. Speaking of comfort, you write about your Wassily Chair, one of the most iconic modern chairs around. That’s really a function of the human body, and there’s not much you can do about it. So it’s essentially very difficult, if not impossible, to be really comfortable over long periods of time if you’re sitting. If you’re sitting, pretty soon you cut off the circulation to some part of the body, and that also leads to discomfort. If you’re sitting on something hard, you eventually get uncomfortable. Sitting is very awkward because you have to support the back, the sitting bones. I mean, basically the body is very well designed for walking and running and standing. You also quote Niels Diffrient, famous for his ergonomic chair designs, who said that sitting comfortably is “a rather unsolvable problem.” Why is it so difficult to make a comfortable chair? There’s a wonderful quote from Charles Eames, who said, “ should only innovate as a last resort.” We think of innovation as a marvelous thing, but really, if you don’t need to innovate, it’s always safer not to. The little folding camp stool is a very good example, because that dates back to Egyptian times. So a stool that the Egyptians sat on will serve us just as well. And so people simply repeat it.Īlso, sitting hasn’t changed. Take a Windsor chair, for example: If you want to make a chair out of wood, and you want to make it light and not too expensive, that’s an excellent design, and you can’t really improve on it. A claw hammer, for example, was invented by the Romans – who invented nails that’s why they needed a hammer.īut if you look at Roman hammers, they’re basically the same as hammers today. And actually there are many tools that last a long time. It’s used for sitting, among other things. Why do a number of chair models – including the Greek klismos chair – remain popular centuries after being developed?Ī chair, of course, is a tool. It’s got these insect-like legs and then a kind of curvy top, and so it reminded people of an insect. But he put very thin metal legs on it, and it’s called the Ant Chair because it actually looks like an ant. He couldn’t find any chairs that he liked that would fit his aesthetic, so he designed this chair, which was very famous because it’s the first chair where the seat and the back are made out one piece of molded wood.
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He was designing a factory, and he had a cafeteria for the workers, and he wanted modern chairs. It’s designed by Arne Jacobsen, a Danish architect.
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There’s a very famous chair that I illustrate in the book called the Ant Chair. And chair legs traditionally had claws at the end or paws or hoofs or things like that. There’s a long history of chairs that look like animals. If it’s empty, then you can almost see a person sitting in a chair, because it’s got arms to support, and it’s got a back – especially if it’s a chair you associate with someone. They have “arms” and “legs” and “backs” and “seats.” It’s easy, when you look at a chair, to imagine the person in it. They remind us of people because we use human terms to describe chairs. And even when he wasn’t on the screen, the chair was almost like a stand-in for him, and other people weren’t allowed to sit in it. So I think chairs, of all the furniture, are the most personal.Īnd they often remind of us people. In All in the Family, Archie Bunker’s chair was very important.
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There are many characters in literature who have a favorite chair or who are associated with a chair. I think chairs are very personal, not just for me but for many people. What’s so special about this piece of furniture? He took a moment to chat about why chairs are often our most treasured pieces of furniture – and why we can stand to sit in them for only so long. His latest book, Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History, takes a humanist approach to this often-ignored piece of furniture, connecting trends, culture, and technological innovation to provide a personal and historical survey. As a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, and a writer on topics such as domestic comfort, the history of hand tools, and the impact of style and fashion on architecture, he has a rare grasp of the evolution of chairs – if not sitting – over the ages. We simply couldn’t do without chairs.Īs an architect, Witold Rybczynski understands the form of a chair in a way many of us don’t. And although experts say our sedentary culture isn’t doing us any favors (standing desks, anyone?), there’s no denying that we’re creatures of habit who love to sit. We may not talk about them much, but chairs, in their many forms, play a big role in our lives. Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History was published in August by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.