Now I Sit Me Down (24 page)

The Luckhardt brothers also designed chairs for Thonet's Berlin-based competitor, Deutsche Stahlmöbel (German Steel Furniture), known as DESTA. The owner of DESTA was Anton Lorenz, a significant if somewhat shadowy presence on the Berlin prewar avant-garde furniture scene. Lorenz was neither an architect nor a craftsman; he is sometimes described as a businessman, but he wasn't exactly that either. In some ways he resembles his contemporary Buckminster Fuller—an inventor-entrepreneur. Born in Budapest, Lorenz accompanied his wife, Irene, an opera singer, to Leipzig. In time, he acquired a metalworking business that made locks. In Berlin, Lorenz met his compatriot Kalman Lengyel and became a partner in Standard Möbel, fabricating Marcel Breuer's tubular furniture in his workshop. After the company was taken over by Thonet, Lorenz continued in the chair business on his own. He demonstrated an unexpected flair for design, as well as proving to be a canny businessman. He had earlier independently registered his own version of a cantilever chair (something that Breuer had neglected to do with the Cesca), and in addition he also acquired the rights to Mart Stam's cantilever chair. With this legal ammunition, Lorenz sued Thonet, the largest furniture company in the world, for infringement of copyright—and won.

Siesta-Medizinal reclining chair (Hans and Wassili Luckhardt)

Lorenz ultimately reached an agreement with Thonet. His company, DESTA, continued to produce tubular steel furniture designed by himself, the Luckhardts, and prominent architects such as Erich Mendelsohn and Otto Rittweger (Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier resisted Lorenz's overtures). Lorenz, who was interested in human physiology, engaged the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute to carry out experiments in body posture, photographing subjects in a saltwater tank to document body positions in a situation of near weightlessness. In 1939, he and Hans Luckhardt filed a joint U.S. patent for an adjustable reclining chair with a pivoting footrest that rose as the back of the chair reclined. As we shall see, this device would have a key role in the development of a new kind of chair.

When Germany invaded Poland, Lorenz and his wife were in California on business, and they decided to stay in the United States, where Lorenz continued to work on chairs. He met Mies van der Rohe in Chicago, and the two patented a conchoidal plastic chair, never produced. Lorenz formed a more productive association with Edward J. Barcalo of Buffalo, whose company made a range of metal furniture—hospital beds, cribs, and garden furniture. Barcalo licensed Lorenz and Luckhardt's reclining mechanism, and in 1946 produced a tubular steel reclining lawn chair, marketed as the BarcaLoafer, as well as a version of the Siesta wheelchair for returning veterans.

Lorenz and Barcalo's ultimate goal was to produce a reclining chair for the home. This required a different design, because while Americans liked inexpensive chromed-steel dining sets and metal lawn chairs, most people did not consider tubular steel furniture appropriate for the living room. In 1947, the Barcalo Company merged with Chandler Industries, a Buffalo furniture manufacturer, in order to produce a fully upholstered reclining chair. Barcalo provided the mechanism based on Lorenz's design; Chandler manufactured the body of the chair. The BarcaLounger was born.

The stately BarcaLounger was entirely unlike its Bauhaus ancestor. The reclining machinery was concealed within a plushy carapace of wood framing and sprung upholstery, resulting in a conservatively styled armchair that sacrificed lightness for comfort. Closed, the chair looked like an ordinary upholstered easy chair, but when the sitter pulled a lever the back reclined and a padded footrest swung up. The so-called recliner was first marketed to white-collar executives; a 1955 magazine advertisement shows a man in a business suit sitting in what is described as “the chair that's teaching America how to relax.” That was not hyperbole; as prices fell, the recliner attracted a wide audience—mostly male—and became the iconic lounge chair of Middle America.
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Recliners were designed to appeal to the widest possible range of tastes; they came in the form of club chairs, wing chairs, and easy chairs, made by companies with catchy names such as Rock-A-Fella, Stratolounger, Slumber Chair, and, of course, La-Z-Boy, another pioneer in the field. Lorenz, with his many patents, benefitted financially from this popularity. One of his last inventions—he died in 1964—was a recliner that provided an intermediate position between upright and horizontal: the television-watching chair.

1950s BarcaLounger

In 1956, in a direct response to the American recliner craze, the Herman Miller company produced a lounge chair designed by Charles and Ray Eames. It was made out of three molded plywood shells—seat, back, and headrest—attached to a metal base with rubber shock mounts. The interior of the shell was heavily padded with foam and upholstered in leather. The veneered shells were Brazilian rosewood and the soft black leather was tufted, giving the chair a luxurious appearance. Although not adjustable, the swiveling chair came with an ottoman and provided the same plushy, legs-up experience as a recliner. Ray Eames described it as “comfortable and un-designy.”

Lounge chair and ottoman (Charles and Ray Eames
)

The Eames chair was intended for the high-end market, and Herman Miller was careful to call it a “lounge chair,” not to be confused with the plebeian recliner. Urban sophisticates scorned the recliner as a symbol of slothfulness and indolence, and derided its conservative styling. President Kennedy's folksy rocking chair was chic; President Johnson's turquoise leather recliner was not. Of course, this was mainly snobbery. Like fins on cars, Dagwood sandwiches, and leisure suits, the American recliner was simply déclassé.

Problem-solving

In the late 1970s, Herman Miller, now a leader in high-design residential and office furniture, took aim at the fastest-growing population segment in the country—the elderly—and commissioned the designers William Stumpf and Don Chadwick to design a chair. The pair decided to focus on the recliner because it was popular with older people and was used not only in homes but also in retirement communities, assisted-living facilities, and even hospitals. They concluded that existing recliners were ill-suited to extended use because the cushiony seats did not offer good support, and the nonbreathable upholstery material, typically leather or Naugahyde, could actually cause bedsores. They substituted a breathable plastic mesh that was cooler and offered better support. They called their product the Sarah Chair.

It took a decade to develop the Sarah Chair, but by then Herman Miller had gotten cold feet. One problem was marketing. Recliners were typically sold in mainstream furniture outlets and department stores, not the kinds of places that carried Herman Miller chairs. Moreover, the public associated the recliner with mainstream taste, and the company feared that a Herman Miller recliner might actually hurt the high-design brand. The project was shelved.

Several years later, Herman Miller asked Stumpf and Chadwick to adapt some of the ideas from the Sarah Chair to a more conventional product: an office chair. The general configuration of office chairs was well established by this time. The secretarial chair was an armless swivel chair on casters, with adjustable height and back. Next in the office chair hierarchy was the managerial chair, with arms and a tilt-back mechanism. At the top of the pyramid was the executive chair, usually leather and with a taller back. A typical executive chair of the 1960s had a swivel-tilt mechanism and two controls: seat height and tilt tension—everything else was fixed.

Swivel-tilt chairs, which originated in the middle of the nineteenth century, were originally intended for the home—they were, in effect, mechanical rocking chairs. They were usually low-back Windsor chairs or fully upholstered easy chairs. By the early 1900s, these had evolved into banker's chairs and stenographer's chairs, although it took several decades for the office chair to gain wide acceptance. A 1912 photograph of the
New York Times
newsroom shows the pressmen sitting not on office chairs but on Thonet N. 18 café chairs.

Stumpf had already designed an office chair for Herman Miller. Unlike other office chairs, his tilted in such a way that the feet stayed flat on the floor. In addition to the usual tilt-back controls, the user could also adjust the height and angle of the back, and the height, width, and angle of the arms. There was a further refinement. Studies had shown that in terms of body weight and height as much as 11 percent of the workforce fell outside the statistical norm, so the chair, called the Ergon, came in two sizes: small and large.

Stumpf and Chadwick incorporated the adjustable features of the Ergon Chair into their design, added lumbar support, and went one better by providing
three
sizes: small, medium, and large. They also did something more radical—they got rid of the upholstery. The Ergon Chair, like all office chairs, had a thick fabric-covered foam seat and back. Taking their cue from the Sarah Chair, the designers substituted woven plastic mesh, which resembled traditional caning but was more resilient.
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Unlike the Sarah, which had thin padding, the mesh was left exposed. The absence of padding increased breathability, which reduced the buildup of body heat that normally occurs in a foam-padded chair. The paper-thin and semitransparent mesh gave the chair its name—Aeron.

Aeron Chair (William Stumpf and Don Chadwick)

The Aeron Chair was a new type of office chair, not an executive chair, nor a managerial chair, nor an office chair, but a “task chair.” It could be used interchangeably in executive offices, conference rooms, and workstations, and it suited a wide range of white-collar workers—executives, managers, financial traders, and software programmers. The Aeron was launched in 1994, the height of the dot-com boom, and the unconventional all-black chair, which represented a rejection of the traditional corporate chair hierarchy, became especially popular in the upstart Internet industry. The chair's relatively high price made it a status symbol, like a Rolex watch or a BMW car. Exactly what the Aeron chair will symbolize in the future is harder to guess; will it stand for the advent of ergonomic comfort in the office, the ascendancy of the sedentary white-collar workplace in the digital age, or simply the hubris of the dot-com bubble?