| The chair is man’s most diversely styled | | | | ergonomics, the chair as artefact has been highly |
| furntire item, with only one basic proviso: that it | | | | amenable to changing aesthetics: from austere to |
| gives someone a place to sit – usually on | | | | flamboyant, whimsical to functional, with many of |
| one’s derriere. If you lie it’s a bed, if | | | | the modern era’s greatest design brains |
| you can share it, it’s a sofa or couch, if | | | | choosing to test their mettle in creating the |
| you can slump sideways it’s a chaise | | | | ultimate, iconic chair. |
| longue, if it has no back it’s a stool. | | | | Some of the great names who have tried, and |
| Ergonomic chairs give the sitter an opportunity to | | | | tried successfully to design a chair that really |
| “sit” on the lower shins as well as | | | | moved things forward, and became an icon: |
| the bottom. What is amazing about the chair is | | | | Marcel Breuer - The Wassily chair. |
| that it is a more or less completely modern | | | | Made of leather and tubular steel, this |
| invention. Before 18th Century in the west, people | | | | unmistakable chair was an instant classic when it |
| did sit, but they sat on benches, mats, cushions, | | | | appeared, years before its time in the mid 1920s. |
| stools, logs, chests or the floor. The earliest chairs | | | | Still manufactured. Breuer was one of the most |
| were only for high-status people, tribal leaders, | | | | prolific members of the Bauhaus the art and |
| the religious elite and of course royalty on | | | | design school, later movement of Weimar, and a |
| elaborate, rarely-used chairs called thrones. Today | | | | protégé of its director Walter |
| the leader of a group undertaking a discussion of | | | | Gropius. After an unsatisfying stint working in |
| some formality is called “the chair”. | | | | Paris, Breuer went back to the Bauhaus, where |
| In the orient, notably the cultures of China and | | | | one of his first projects was the 1926 steel club |
| Japan the chair is distincly foreign construct, more | | | | armchair (later renamed the Wassily, after the |
| or less unknown before the 20th Century. | | | | Bauhaus teacher Wassily Kandinsky) made from |
| In the new field of modern design, the simple | | | | extruded nickel-plated tubular steel. Unusually light |
| seat has a totemic status. The history of | | | | and easy to assemble from ready-made steel |
| 20th-century design can be charted by looking at | | | | tubes, the chair was the result of Breuer's years |
| the development of the chair. With the rise of | | | | of experiments with bending steel. It was |
| new materials, the advances in engineering and | | | | immediately recognised as an important |
| mass production techniques and consciousness of | | | | breakthrough in furniture design. |