The Design of the Everyday Chair

A A chair is one of the most ordinary objects in the world, and one of the most quietly difficult to design well. Its task sounds simple: to hold a seated human body comfortably for as long as that body wishes to remain there. In practice this means supporting an uneven, shifting weight, coping with people of wildly different shapes and sizes, and doing so without collapsing, without costing too much and, ideally, while looking attractive. Few everyday things ask their makers to reconcile so many competing demands at once, which is why the chair has occupied designers for centuries. Get any of these wrong and the failure is immediate and personal: a chair that is too hard grows painful within minutes, one that is too soft leaves the sitter slumped, and one that is poorly balanced can tip its occupant onto the floor.

B For most of history the chair was not ordinary at all. In many societies ordinary people sat on the floor, on mats, on low stools or on shared benches, while a chair with a back and arms was reserved for those of high rank. To sit in a chair while others stood or crouched was to display authority, and a trace of this old meaning survives in our language: the person who leads a meeting is still called the chair or chairman, and the seat of a king is a throne, the grandest chair of all. In grand houses a single fine chair might be reserved for the master or an honoured guest, while everyone else made do with whatever was to hand, so that simply being offered a chair was a courtesy heavy with meaning.

C When designers try to make a chair fit the body, they enter the field of ergonomics. A well-made seat supports the natural curve of the lower back, spreads the sitter's weight so that no single part is under too much pressure, and places the feet and arms at comfortable angles. Because human bodies vary so much, many modern office chairs are adjustable, allowing the height, the back and the arms to be moved until the chair fits its particular owner rather than forcing the owner to fit the chair. The stakes are high, because so many people now spend their working lives seated. A chair that quietly forces the spine into an awkward curve, hour after hour and day after day, can contribute to lasting aches and injuries, and the study of how to prevent this has grown into a serious field of its own.

D A turning point in the story of the chair came in 1859, when the German-Austrian maker Michael Thonet produced his Model No. 14. Instead of being carved by hand from solid timber, it was built from a small number of lengths of beech that had been bent into graceful curves using steam. The design used so few parts that the chairs could be packed unassembled into a crate, shipped cheaply across the world and screwed together on arrival. Simple, light and inexpensive, the No. 14 sold in the tens of millions and brought the chair within reach of almost everyone. Versions of the design are still made today, more than a century and a half later, and its light, curving shape can be seen in cafes around the world, a quiet monument to the idea that good design need not be costly.

E In the twentieth century the chair became a playground for ambitious designers. New materials, including tubular steel, moulded plywood and later plastic, allowed shapes that solid wood could never achieve; designers such as Marcel Breuer, who bent tubular steel, and Charles and Ray Eames, who moulded plywood and plastic, turned the seat into a canvas. Some of these creations were prized as much for their sculptural beauty as for their comfort, appearing in galleries and photographs as statements about how modern life should look. The chair had become, among other things, a work of art. A single celebrated chair could be reproduced in its thousands and yet still carry the name of its designer, and museums began to collect chairs much as they collected paintings or sculpture.

F More recently, attention has turned to a problem the chair itself may create. Research suggests that sitting still for long stretches, however well supported, is bad for human health, and that the body benefits from frequent movement. Designers have responded with seats that encourage small shifts of posture, with desks that can be raised so that people work standing up, and with a general reminder that the healthiest chair may be the one a person does not stay in for too long. The humble seat, it seems, is still being reinvented. The newest thinking treats a chair less as a fixed resting place than as one posture among many, to be left as readily as it is taken up.