Now I Sit Me Down (15 page)

A few years later, when Otto Wagner, the dean of Austrian avant-garde architects, was building the Postsparkasse, the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank in Vienna, a seminal building of the Secession movement, he likewise furnished it with Gebrüder Thonet bentwood chairs of his own design. Wagner's side chairs and armchairs had very simple geometrical shapes, and they were a radical departure from tradition: instead of a round dowel he specified a square cross-section, and he gave it an ebonized finish (previously bentwood chairs had been stained). One of Wagner's most memorable designs was a stool for public use in the main banking hall: the black frame is a perfect cube made out of five identical pieces of bentwood supporting a veneer seat with a rectangular slot for lifting. Soon, chairs in the new “Postsparkassen style” appeared in the Thonet catalogue.

Wagner's Post Office Savings Bank was a
Gesamtkunstwerk
, a total work of art in which architecture, decor, and furnishings contributed to the aesthetic effect. This all-encompassing approach was the foundation of the Wiener Werkstätte, an artists' and craftsmen's cooperative that undertook architectural commissions and produced furniture, textiles, tableware, and jewelry and other luxury goods. In 1907, the Werkstätte established its own nightclub, the Cabaret Fledermaus, in the cellar of a Viennese apartment house. The architect Josef Hoffmann, co-founder of the Werkstätte, was not only responsible for the decor, he also designed the furniture, as well as the crockery, silverware, and serving dishes. The nightclub's bentwood chairs had an upholstered seat and a curved unpadded back rail that became the arms. By all accounts the chairs were not particularly comfortable, but they were a radical departure from the bentwood chairs of the past, with runners instead of straight legs and stylish ornament in the form of billiard-ball-size spheres. Kohn supplied the chair in an ebonized finish with white balls, and vice versa. The ball motif also showed up in Hoffman's
Sitzmaschine
, a lounge chair designed in 1905 for another Werkstätte project, the Purkersdorf Sanatorium outside Vienna. The frames that formed the arms, legs, and back of the chair were bent ash; the solid inserts with decorative cutouts were sycamore. The back was adjustable and a footrest pulled out from under the seat. The chair was provided with a fitted cushion, although with its flat back, square geometry, and hard surfaces it doesn't look very inviting. According to the Museum of Modern Art, which has the
Sitzmaschine
in its collection: “This armchair, with its exposed structure, demonstrates a rational simplification of forms suited to machine production.” Actually, most of the little wooden balls appear highly
ir
rational, the “simple” connections all rely on screws, and because there are so many different parts to assemble the claim that the form is suited to machine production is far-fetched. On the other hand, it definitely
looks
machinelike.

Postsparkasse stool (Otto Wagner)

By the early 1900s, in addition to traditional designs, which constituted the bulk of their production, Gebrüder Thonet and other bentwood manufacturers were offering “modern” chairs, many of which were designed by architects. The desire of avant-garde architects to furnish interiors with furniture of their own design was not uncommon at the time. M. H. Baillie Scott and C.F.A. Voysey in London, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret, in Glasgow, and the young Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago also designed special chairs. But these architect-designed chairs were custom-made in small quantities in local workshops and were not available to the public, whereas Wagner's bank stool and Hoffmann's
Sitzmaschine
could be purchased from the Thonet and Kohn showrooms.

Sitzmaschine
(Josef Hoffmann)

The Viennese collaboration between architects and industry signals a historical shift. For centuries, the man who conceived the chair and the man who made it had been the same person. This started to change in the eighteenth century: Chippendale was assisted by journeymen joiners, but at least by training and experience he was familiar with the craft. A French master joiner had a similar intimate knowledge of chairmaking, even if the carving, gilding, and upholstery were done by others. By the time Michael Thonet's factories were in full swing, he must be considered more an entrepreneur than a cabinetmaker, although the fabrication process was his own invention and the chairs were his design. By the early 1900s, the industrial process that Thonet invented made it possible to separate the design of a chair from its fabrication. The era of the independent chair designer, who was neither a cabinetmaker nor a manufacturer, had arrived.

 

EIGHT

By Design

The Wassily Chair is a modern classic. This version of a traditional club chair is made out of leather straps stretched inside a framework of shiny steel tubes. The Vitra Design Museum describes the chair as “the epitome of the spirit of Modernity” and “an aesthetic turning point in furniture production.” A Museum of Modern Art catalogue accompanying a recent exhibition on the Bauhaus didn't mince words and simply called it “perfect.”

I came across the Wassily Chair as an architecture student. I knew it only from photographs—none of my friends owned one—so I never had a chance to sit in it, but I wanted one. I must have told my wife about my craving, for one year she presented me with the chair on my birthday. It was as handsome in real life as it had been in photographs. The leather seat, back, and arms seemed to be suspended in midair within a metal frame that had the appearance of an early flying machine. I looked forward to using it for reading, but I was disappointed when I sat in it. The extreme angle of the seat allowed only one sitting position, so I soon started to fidget—as much as this unyielding chair would allow. The hard edge of the leather cut into the underside of my thighs; the armrest, which resembled a barber's strop, was unpleasant; getting up was difficult; and when I placed a book on the seat, it slid off. Eventually, the chair was relegated to our bedroom, where it functioned perfectly as a place to hang my trousers.

How is it possible for a chair with so many functional shortcomings to become a classic? The brief answer is that what makes Marcel Breuer's Wassily Chair a classic has less to do with its performance than with its appearance. In other words, the criteria are chiefly aesthetic. “I think that comfort is a function of whether you think the chair is good-looking or not,” Philip Johnson once observed. “I have had Mies van der Rohe chairs now for twenty-five years in my home wherever I go. They are not very comfortable chairs, but, if people like the looks of them they say ‘Aren't these beautiful chairs,' which indeed they are. Then they'll sit in them and say, ‘My, aren't they comfortable.'” Johnson didn't reveal what people said when they tried to get up out of Mies's Barcelona Chairs, which are very low and lack arms. Probably “Oof!”

The idea that a chair can be appreciated primarily as an aesthetic object originated with the Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld. Although Rietveld was trained as a cabinetmaker by his joiner father, the iconic easy chair that he built in 1918, a year after opening his own furniture workshop in Amsterdam, owed little to the furniture maker's craft. The chair was made out of pieces of standard lumber simply screwed together—no dovetails, no mortise-and-tenon joints. The seat and the back were flat wooden planks.

Wassily Chair (Marcel Breuer)

In some ways, Rietveld's chair resembles my trusty Adirondack chair. The Adirondack chair, which was invented by Thomas Lee in 1903, likewise uses flat boards and uncomplicated joints. But the resemblance ends there. Lee's aim was to make a simple outdoor chair for his summer house in Westport, New York; Rietveld's aim was to make an artistic statement. The statement was about geometry and space. Each part of the chair—seat, back, legs, arms—was articulated and given equal visual importance. The wood was initially varnished, but in later versions Rietveld painted the back red, the seat blue, and the frame black and yellow, which made it look like a three-dimensional Mondrian painting (Rietveld and Mondrian both belonged to the De Stijl art group). The chair became known as the Red Blue Chair. The use of a title is revealing. Thonet simply assigned catalogue numbers or descriptive labels to his chairs, but Rietveld's chair was a work of art, so it had to have a title.

The Red Blue Chair abounds with ergonomic challenges: the edges are sharp, the seat is hard and steeply angled, the armrests are flat pieces of wood. According to the architectural historian Peter Collins, Rietveld's chair was “the first chair deliberately designed not for comfort, not for dignity, not for elegance, not for rational assembly according to commonly accepted principles of woodwork, but simply ‘designed.'” For the early-twentieth-century European avant-garde, “design” was a universal language, the visual equivalent of Esperanto. The architect Walter Gropius expressed a commonly held view when he proclaimed, “the process of designing a great building or a simple chair differs only in degree, not in principle.” According to Collins, not only did modern chairs resemble architectural structures, modern buildings came to resemble furniture, inasmuch as they were designed “to look good from the air: i.e., from the point of view which one normally sees furniture when entering a room.”

Gropius founded the Bauhaus arts and crafts school to teach his universalist proposition. One of his first students was a young Hungarian, Marcel Breuer, who had been an art student in Vienna, but dissatisfied with what he considered an overly theoretical education had enrolled in the Bauhaus woodworking program. A precocious talent, Breuer became Gropius's protégé, and after he graduated he was invited back to teach furniture design. That was 1925, and that same year, working in his spare time, Breuer built the Wassily Chair.
1
He was only twenty-three, and although he had built wooden chairs as a student, this was his first project in tubular steel. The overall form of the chair was influenced by Rietveld's Red Blue Chair, which had been exhibited at the Bauhaus. Like the Red Blue Chair, the Wassily Chair was a constructivist design statement, although it was slightly more inviting because the stretched fabric of the original was more accommodating than flat wood.

Breuer ordered the nickel-plated tubular steel pieces from the Mannessmann Steel Works, which, in the 1890s, had invented a process of manufacturing seamless tubes that, unlike the seamed variety, could be bent. Breuer said that his interest in tubular steel was sparked by the handlebars of his first bicycle. He recalled that a friend told him: “Did you ever see how they make those parts? How they bend those handlebars? You would be interested because they bend those steel tubes like macaroni.” Although German hospitals used furniture made out of steel, which was more hygienic than wood, no one had previously used tubular steel for a domestic chair.