Chairs - A Fresh Look
The chair is man’s most diversely styled furntire item, with only one basic proviso: that it gives man a place to sit – normally on one’s derriere. If you lie it’s a bed, if you can share it, it’s a sofa or couch, if you can slump sideways it’s a chaise longue, if it has no back it’s a stool. Ergonomic chairs give the sitter an opportunity to “sit” on the lower shins as well as the bottom. What is remarkable about the chair is that it is a more or less thoroughly modern invention. Before 18th Century in the west, citizen did sit, but they sat on benches, mats, cushions, stools, logs, chests or the floor. The earliest chairs were only for high-status people, tribal leaders, the religious elite and of procedure royalty on elaborate, rarely-used chairs called thrones. Today the leader of a group undertaking a argument of some formality is called “the chair”. In the orient, notably the cultures of China and Japan the chair is distincly foreign construct, more or less unknown before the 20th Century.
Chairs - A Fresh Look
In the new field of modern design, the uncomplicated seat has a totemic status. The history of 20th-century form can be charted by looking at the improvement of the chair. With the rise of new materials, the advances in engineering and mass output techniques and consciousness of ergonomics, the chair as artefact has been very amenable to changing aesthetics: from austere to flamboyant, whimsical to functional, with many of the modern era’s many form brains selecting to test their mettle in creating the ultimate, iconic chair.
Some of the great names who have tried, and tried successfully to form a chair that absolutely moved things forward, and became an icon:
Marcel Breuer - The Wassily chair.
Made of leather and tubular steel, this unmistakable chair was an instant superior when it appeared, years before its time in the mid 1920s. Still manufactured. Breuer was one of the most prolific members of the Bauhaus the art and form school, later movement of Weimar, and a protégé of its director Walter Gropius. After an unsatisfying stint working in Paris, Breuer went back to the Bauhaus, where one of his first projects was the 1926 steel club armchair (later renamed the Wassily, after the Bauhaus educator Wassily Kandinsky) made from extruded nickel-plated tubular steel. Unusually light and easy to assemble from ready-made steel tubes, the chair was the consequent of Breuer's years of experiments with bending steel. It was immediately recognised as an prominent breakthrough in furniture design.
Olivier Mourgue - the Djinn Chair
Used in the film 2001 A Space Odyssey, in the oribiting hotel
Olivier Morgue:. The chairs (in the orbiting Hilton Hotel) were designed independently of the movie by French designer Olivier Mourgue. They were produced starting in 1965, and called the "Djinn". There was a chair (with and without arms), a two seater sofa, a chaise-lounge, and a stool. I don't know if they are still in production. The series was made by the French enterprise Airborne International.
Francois Lefranc - Indulgence Chair - lounge chair (2001)Compressed polyurethane foam. Lefranc is a designer-maker who is also a thriving architect with a global reach, together with France, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and the Dominican Republic. This lounge chair, made of inviting candy-stripes went into mass output for the contribute of seating for the Las Vegas convention centre.
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