Now I Sit Me Down (21 page)

In the United States, the Fenby Chair was sold by Abercrombie & Fitch; Theodore Roosevelt was photographed in a Fenby while on safari in Africa. The chair was also used by the British and American military. The Italian version, manufactured in Tripoli and called the Tripolina, was the inspiration for a noncollapsible chair designed in 1938 by three Argentinian architects. They replaced the wooden sticks with a rigid metal frame and changed the proportions to make the upright chair more like an easy chair. With its exaggerated sculptural look, the “butterfly chair” became a modernist favorite. When we were first married, we had two butterfly chairs in our sparsely furnished living room. We salvaged the frames from the back-lane trash and painted them, and my wife laboriously sewed the canvas slings. The chairs were comfortable once you dropped into them, although getting up could be awkward.

Fenby Chair (Joseph Fenby)

We also owned several director's chairs, which were used in the dining room. The director's chair, like the butterfly chair, assumed an iconic status among architects of my generation. If you couldn't afford a Cesca—and we couldn't—a director's chair was an acceptable substitute. Like the Fenby, it was a nineteenth-century invention, introduced in 1892 by the Gold Medal Camp Furniture Manufacturing Company of Racine, Wisconsin, which produced military, camping, and porch furniture. The wood-and-canvas folding armchair, patterned on the folding camp stool, may have been designed by Louis Latour, who was responsible for the company's bestselling folding cot. The collapsible armchair was intended for campers and yachtsmen, but in the early 1920s it gained an unintended clientele—and its name—thanks to the emerging Hollywood film industry. Directors and actors were often photographed on movie sets sitting on the lightweight, portable chairs. A hundred years later, these inexpensive chairs remain as popular as ever, and are still made by the Gold Medal Company, now located in Tennessee.

The most common outdoor folding chair today is the folding aluminum lawn chair, which comes as both an armchair and a chaise longue, the latter a worthy successor to the deck chair. Invented in 1947 by Fredric Arnold, a Brooklyn manufacturer, the chair is made of aluminum tubes and, unlike a director's chair, follows the configuration of a Chinese folding chair, although it has none of its fluidity; indeed, the lawn chair is downright homely. You won't find an aluminum lawn chair in a design museum, but perhaps you should. The chair does its job extremely well: it is light (less than four pounds); folded, it takes little space; it has arms; and it can be left outside without rusting. Arnold's original chair used canvas, but this was later replaced by nylon webbing. This chair has none of the upper-class cachet and glamour of the steamer chair or the safari chair; it is cheerfully plebeian—which may be the reason that museums ignore it. Lawn chairs are at home everywhere: on the beach, at tailgate parties and suburban barbecues, or lining sidewalks for a Fourth of July parade.

Folding aluminum lawn chair (Fredric Arnold)

The lawn chair's indoor cousin is the ubiquitous metal folding chair, a common presence at community events, church suppers, bingo nights, and high school convocations—indeed, anywhere temporary seating is required. The design of a typical folding chair resembles a Chinese folding chair: a two-piece X-frame of tubular metal, with a backrest and a flip-down seat made of metal or plastic. This Plain Jane chair is not terribly comfortable but it is adequate for an hour or two; some versions are padded. Although high-end furniture companies have produced fancy folding chairs, this seems like gilding the lily or, perhaps, gilding the dandelion.

Knockdown

The French and Italian words for furniture—
meubles
and
mobilia
—mean “movables” and date from the Middle Ages, when furniture accompanied its aristocratic owners as they moved from city house to country estate on their seasonal peregrinations. Benches and backstools were simply transported whole, but in order to be moved, tables and beds were taken apart—knocked down. In time, furniture became stationary, with occasional exceptions such as George Washington's trestle dining table. Demountable furniture came into its own in the late eighteenth century during the Napoleonic Wars. British officers stationed abroad expected to enjoy the comforts of home, and London outfitters provided a variety of travel items: trunks, spirits cases, and lap desks, as well as knockdown furniture in the form of bookshelves, beds, tables, and, of course, chairs. Most campaign chairs were simply conventional ones that could be disassembled by unscrewing the front legs and unbolting the seat from the back, although some dispensed with screws and bolts by hinging the various parts and using a drop-in seat to brace the frame. Early knockdown chairs were upholstered, but woven cane became increasingly popular because of its lightness. The Douro Chair, named after the Douro River in Portugal, where the British campaigned during the Peninsular War, was a caned easy chair with leather strap arms and loose horsehair cushions. The folded and disassembled parts fitted snugly inside a wooden box that, with the addition of screw-on legs, itself did double duty as a table. A “chair bed” was an armchair that folded out to resemble a chaise longue, and was particularly popular with ship's captains. Admiral Lord Nelson had a portable washstand and a writing box in his cabin on the
Victory
, although his favorite armchair, a black-leather-upholstered easy chair with tufted cushions, was not collapsible. Campaign furniture was not only for the high and mighty. The London supplier J. W. Allen, who specialized in military equipage, offered a “barrack outfit” for junior officers: a collapsible iron bedstead, a chest, a washstand, and a Douro Chair, all for twenty-five pounds.

Douro Chair

Roorkhee Chair

By the end of the nineteenth century, luxurious campaign furniture had been replaced by what we would call camp furniture. The Roorkhee Chair, named after the regimental headquarters of the Indian Army Corps of Engineers, was a mass-produced wood-and-canvas easy chair. The ten pieces of turned oak or mahogany, pegged in predrilled holes, were held together by two wing nuts and the laced canvas seat. Disassembled, the dowels and the canvas could be rolled into a compact bundle. The chair was not only quickly assembled and disassembled without tools, the frame was flexible enough to be stable no matter how uneven the ground.

The utilitarian Roorkhee Chair was used in Africa during the Boer War and later became popular with big-game hunters on safari. Its unknown inventor was likely a member of the Corps of Engineers—the ingenious design has an engineer's sense of straightforward functionality. No wonder the chair influenced the early European modernists. Its leather-strap arms showed up in Breuer's Wassily Chair, as well as in Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret, and Le Corbusier's
fauteuil
à
dossier basculant
, a tubular steel armchair that also copied the Roorkhee Chair's most comfortable feature, a pivoting back. In 1933, after seeing a photograph of the Roorkhee Chair, Kaare Klint modified the proportions, simplified the turnings, made the seat lower and slightly slanted, and produced his enduring Safari Chair. It includes a modification suggested by Klint's friend Arne Jacobsen: a loose seat cushion. The first Safari Chair I saw was in the office of one of my professors, who had studied in Copenhagen. Soon after I graduated, I purchased one of my own, although all I could afford was a less-expensive imitation—a copy of a copy.

Knockdown furniture was convenient for peripatetic military officers, but in an age of international trade it had another advantage: a demountable chair was cheaper to ship. Many of Thonet's chairs, both bentwood and tubular steel, were transported flat from the factory to his shops, where they were assembled before delivery to customers. In 1925, Theophilus Billington, who had owned a furniture store in Dallas, received a patent for “a simple and inexpensive table which may be manufactured and compactly shipped in knocked-down condition but quickly and easily set up by the merchant or other party receiving the shipment.” A couple of decades later, an Ohio furniture manufacturer, Erie J. Sauder, began making ready-to-assemble furniture for a mail-order company. But the major breakthrough in knockdown furniture occurred elsewhere. In 1951, a Swedish draftsman, Gillis Lundgren, had a eureka moment. He had bought a table, and being unable to fit it into his Volvo, he unscrewed the legs and reassembled them when he got home. Lundgren worked for a mail-order company that sold furniture. Why not design furniture that could be shipped flat and was assembled by the buyer, he reasoned. He mentioned his idea to his employer, Ingvar Kamprad, and a few years later the company produced its first piece of knockdown furniture. Needless to say, I am describing IKEA.

Anyone who has struggled to assemble an IKEA product will have mixed feelings about Lundgren's discovery. Over the years I have put together a table and several IKEA bookshelves and cupboards, but never a chair. As a test, I bought the most basic wooden chair in the IKEA catalogue, a side chair called Ivar.
3
The chair cost twenty-five dollars and came in a flat cardboard box only four inches thick. IKEA's wooden furniture is made in one of forty-four plants located in eleven countries; my chair came from China. There were seven pieces: two side frames, two slats, two rails, and a seat, all unpainted wood. There was also a plastic bag of assorted hardware and an Allen wrench. I counted the ten screws and sixteen wooden pegs before starting because I remembered that IKEA doesn't provide extras. I carefully read the instruction booklet, which resembled a comic strip without words. There were six steps, and it seemed clear enough except for step five, which included “Do” and “Don't” diagrams that to me looked identical. Undeterred, I plunged ahead.

“IKEA is Legos for grownups, connecting the furniture of our adulthoods with the toys of our childhoods,” wrote Lauren Collins in
The New Yorker
. I'm not convinced by the analogy because I've never actually enjoyed assembling IKEA products, but it took only fifteen minutes to put Ivar together, which included going down to the basement when I realized that I needed a Phillips screwdriver. The result was a simple ladder-back chair with a flat wooden seat. It was not without small refinements: the back was slightly inclined, the slats were gently curved, the seat was subtly wedge-shaped, and the rear legs were splayed, giving the chair an attractive stance.