Now I Sit Me Down (18 page)

Plastic shell armchair (Charles and Ray Eames)

The Eames shell chair—the world's first plastic chair—was even more revolutionary than the potato-chip chair, because it was not simply the result of an innovative manufacturing technique, like bending wood or tubular steel, but also used a new material. A decade later, the British chair designer Robin Day produced a shell chair molded out of polypropylene, the Polyprop Chair.
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While not as elegant as the Eames design, it was considerably less expensive, the modern equivalent of the Thonet café chair—“the price of a bottle of good wine.” The ultimate descendant of the Eames shell chair is the ubiquitous one-piece plastic chair that will be discussed in the final chapter.

The year that the Eames shell chair appeared—1950—
Life
published an article on Charles Eames that called him “the best-known U.S. designer of modern furniture,” which was true although it ignored Ray's contribution. “Eames is so interested in making the products of his drawing board available at the lowest cost that the modest retail price of his recent chair ($32.50) bothers him … he guiltily feels that it should sell for less.” Four plastic Eames chairs cost $130 at a time when a chrome kitchen dinette set of four chairs
and
a table sold for well under a hundred dollars. My parents had one of these sets in the kitchen when I was growing up in the 1950s: the tabletop was Formica in a cracked-ice pattern, the chairs had shiny tubular steel frames with seats and backs upholstered in marbled vinyl. They were pretty clumsy compared with the graceful Eames chairs.

Charles and Ray Eames designed many more chairs: a wire mesh version of the shell chair; a luxurious, extremely popular lounge chair and ottoman that combined plywood shells with deep leather upholstery; and a line of cast-aluminum office furniture that used thin padded slings as seats and backs. In the 1960s, the Eameses produced a variety of expensive executive office chairs, but it was the plastic chair that remained closest to their goal of a chair that was “simple and yet comfortable” with “an inherent rightness.” Eames had nothing to feel guilty about—he had achieved what many modern chair designers strove for but few attained.

Fewer than twenty-five years separate the Eames plastic shell chair from Marcel Breuer's first cantilever chair. Both share an iconoclastic approach, using new materials in novel ways. Both chairs are loosely referred to as “modern,” and both are dramatic departures from convention. Breuer's cantilever chair is actually more radical, since it is a chair on only two legs and incorporates an unprecedented springiness. In that regard, the Eames shell chair is more traditional: a seat supported by four legs. However, appearances can be deceiving. The Breuer chair, although it embodies the image of a machine-made object, is a crafted artifact largely assembled by hand, while the Eames chair is a true industrial product.
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Yet the latter would not exist without the former. Breuer set the agenda—a chair that would be manufactured rather than built, and whose appearance would be the result of how it was made. The Eames shell chair fulfilled this ambitious goal.

The Cesca Chair, the Paimio lounge chair, the potato-chip chair, and the plastic shell chair are true modern classics. They fulfill the ideal of combining new processes and new materials to produce new forms. The forms are not simply aesthetic inventions; they are the result of considerable technical innovation and refinement. There have been many unusually shaped chairs since, but few real rivals, which is probably why all four chairs remain in production today. Like the cabriole chair and the bentwood chair, they represent an enduring kind of perfection, a considered balance between means and ends.

 

NINE

Great Dane

“It was not until about sixty years ago that the ultimate test of architectural genius became whether or not one could design a new kind of chair,” observed Peter Collins. He wrote that in 1963, and since then the number of architects designing chairs has multiplied. A recent example is the Dream Chair, the work of the prizewinning Japanese architect Tadao Ando, who had never designed a production chair before. I thought it would be interesting to see the chair—and to sit on it.

The Dream Chair is prominently displayed in the New York showroom of Carl Hansen & Søn, an established Danish furniture manufacturer. This lounge chair is made out of two large molded plywood shells, one for the seat and the other for the base. “It is possible with standard plywood to have minor double-curved planes, but it will for sure not be possible to bend the Ando chair with normal veneer,” explained Jesper Bruun, Hansen's head of development, in an e-mail. He described the unconventional veneer of the Dream Chair as “wooden strings held together by glue.”

The chair is punctuated by three ovals: a padded headrest, a hole cut into the seat, and an identical hole in the base. The headrest is adjustable, a ratcheted feature commonly found in car seats but which strikes me as slightly out of place in a domestic chair. The base is cantilevered, so that when I sit down the chair flexes pleasantly. However, after a few minutes, the edge of the hole that is cut into the seat also cuts into my tail bone. It is a small but persistent irritant, like having a tiny stone in one's shoe.

Looking around the Hansen showroom I recognize another plywood chair, an older model originally introduced more than fifty years ago. A low easy chair, it also consists of two pieces of curved plywood—a seat and back. They are supported on three legs: the two front legs made out of a single curved piece of laminated wood, and a hind leg doubling as a support for the backrest. Upholstered pads are attached to the plywood with brass fasteners that are plainly visible on the back and underside. My first impression is of an improbable tour de force: four pieces of wood, three legs, swooping curves. But when I sit down, I appreciate the roomy proportions and the comfortable shape. The sculptural “wings” that flare out dramatically on each side are actually convenient places to rest my hands—and to push against when I get up. The designer, Hans Wegner, had two decades of experience under his belt when he designed this chair, and it shows.

Wegner “helped change the course of design history in the 1950s and '60s by sanding modernism's sharp edges and giving aesthetes a comfortable seat,” read his
New York Times
obituary. In
The Shape of Time
, George Kubler pointed out that the impact of an artist depends not only on his personal abilities but also on the timing of his entrance onto the world stage. “Each man's lifework is also a work in a series extending beyond him in either or both directions, depending upon his position in the track he occupies,” he wrote. Wegner's position in the track of furniture history was particularly fortuitous: he was in the right place at exactly the right moment.

Shell Chair (Hans Wegner)

Hans J. Wegner was born in 1914 in Tønder, a small town in southern Denmark. He grew up in a craft tradition; his father was a master cobbler. At fourteen, young Hans was apprenticed to a local cabinetmaker—his qualifying project for the journeyman's exam was a lady's desk. When he was twenty-one, he went to Copenhagen to fulfill his military service. The city opened his eyes, and he realized that his knowledge of furniture design—as opposed to joinery—was limited. The following year, after completing a short cabinetmaker's course he enrolled in the Cabinetmaker Day School. The Day School was an offshoot of the furniture school of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, whose founder and director was Kaare Klint, an architect and cabinetmaker who is sometimes called the godfather of modern Danish furniture.

Klint, who was born in 1888, considered the chair a functional necessity—a tool for sitting—but while he was no historicist, he did not reject the past. “All the problems are not new, and several of them have been solved before,” he instructed his students. His own designs were often updated versions of traditional chairs, especially English chairs, which he particularly admired. His oeuvre included a wing chair, a leather-covered club chair, a deep leather love seat, a chaise longue based on a steamer chair, and a rush-bottomed church chair of Shaker-like simplicity. Klint pioneered the teaching of anthropometrics—the study of body measurements—in chair design. He also emphasized the importance of details, which would become a leading characteristic of Danish furniture.

Klint's lifetime output of chairs, tables, and cabinets amounted to only thirty pieces. There is a story that he was once visited by a friend, the Swedish architect Erik Gunnar Asplund, who described his current projects, and Klint responded that he was designing a chair. The two met again a couple of years later, and after Asplund described several new commissions he asked Klint what he was up to. “Well, I told you the last time we met,” he replied with what sounds like exasperation, “I am working on a chair.” That particular chair came to be known as the Red Chair, thanks to the color of its oxhide upholstery. It is a mahogany side chair, with delicately curved and splayed rear legs and the proportions of a Chippendale cabriole chair, although there are no decorations and the inviting concave front rail of the seat is not a Chippendale detail.

The much-admired Red Chair won a grand prix medal at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, the same event at which Mies van der Rohe unveiled the Barcelona Chair. Klint and Mies shared a modernist sensibility, but not much else. What set the Dane apart from his Bauhaus contemporaries was his devotion to traditional woodworking techniques, and a preference for adapting and distilling rather than inventing. He combined Danish conservatism with a strictly functionalist approach, establishing normative dimensions for furniture, paying close attention to ergonomic comfort, taking care with details, and respecting traditional skills. Above all, he married modern design to old-fashioned craftsmanship.

Unlike many of his friends, Wegner did not apply to the Academy to study under Klint but left the Day School after completing only two years of the three-year course. One has the sense that at twenty-five he was eager to get started. His first job was in the office of the architects Arne Jacobsen and Erik Møller, where he worked on furniture. Jacobsen and Møller were Denmark's leading modernists, and Wegner's designs were simple and undecorated, but they were also rooted in tradition: spindle-back Windsor chairs for the reading room of a library, and distinctly conservative mahogany-and-leather armchairs for the council chamber of a city hall. In the early 1940s, even as Denmark was still under Nazi occupation, Wegner began to work on his own, not as a cabinetmaker but as an independent furniture designer.

Denmark is a small country—in 1940 its population was fewer than 4 million, the economy was still primarily agricultural, and industrialization had barely begun. Furniture was not produced in factories but in small workshops staffed by cabinetmakers and joiners who used traditional woodworking tools and techniques. Danish furniture designers generally collaborated with these workshops, and Wegner established a relationship with the master cabinetmaker Johannes Hansen (no relation to Carl Hansen). One of their first projects—in 1944—was a rocking chair. Its high back and woven seat recall a rush-bottom Shaker rocker, except that instead of a ladder back it had tapered spindles, as slender as those of an American Windsor chair. The rockers of a rocking chair must be slightly splayed, for if they are parallel the rocking movement will cause the chair to creep across the floor. Wegner increased the angle and made the proportions of the seat more generous, like a wedge-shaped cabriole chair. The seat was handwoven three-ply twisted paper cord.
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The four-panel weaving was a traditional technique that produced a pleasantly shaped seat. The chair proved extremely popular and remains in production today.

The crest rail of Wegner's rocking chair is tall enough to support the head; I know because this is the chair I sit on when I watch television. This chair affords me great pleasure, not only because it is comfortable but also because it
feels
good. The woven seat has a pleasant resilience, the arms are slightly curved and rounded, and the turned pieces have bulging shapes that I can't help stroking. The beechwood has a clear lacquer finish that allows the wood grain to come through.