the life of chairs

8/17/2019 The Life of Chairs

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January-February, 1997

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Brief life of a lover of Africa: 1852-1905

by Maria Petringa

Grab a seat, sit down, and read about that

creature of comfort--the inescapable chair by Edward Tenner

The coming confrontation between "the West

and the rest"by Samuel P. Huntington

Major gifts fund computer sciences and

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Also, be sure to check out the current Classifieds



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Jake Cress's Ball and Claw Chair, recently displayed at theSmithsonian's Renwick Gallery, is a quadruped with ergonomic

problems of its own. Photograph by Martin Church

The Norwegian chair manufacturer T.M. Grimsrud, president and CEO of the prestigious company Hag A.S.A., once

confessed in the journal Ergonomics that "humans were not created to sit; humans were created to walk, stand, jog, run,

hunt, fish, and to be in motion; when they wanted to rest, they laid down on the ground." This statement is probably not valid

anthropology; nearly 40 years ago, Gordon Hewes identified dozens of sitting positions around the world in a Scientific

American article that unfortunately remains the main summary of its subject. But perhaps this variety only reinforces the first

part of Grimsrud's statement. If there were a natural way to sit, we would not have so many chair designs with radically

different principles, from kneeling to reclining. No wonder artists almost invariably portray Adam and Eve standing in

paradise. Before the fall, we were indeed upright. Standing is in many ways a healthier position than sitting, especiallysitting in chairs, which tend to rotate the pelvis forward and increase the load on the spinal column by about 30 percent.

Prolonged sitting at work has been shown to shrink the spine and swell the feet temporarily. No matter. The more ills

Western-born science traces to the Western- (or more exactly Near Eastern- and Mediterranean-) born chair, the more

ubiquitous it has become worldwide. In the German historian Hajo Eickhoff's expression, Homo sapiens has becomeHomo

sedens.

Seating defies linear chronology. Materials and doctrines change, but the human body and certain basic forms remain.

Reclining, for example, connects the ancient Athenian symposiast, the Viennese analysand, and the San Jose

programmer. Even the ubiquitous folding director's chair echoes the field seating of Roman officers. Sometimes analysis


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must follow chairs as they move through time and space, for the chair itself sits at an often dangerous intersection of the

cultural and the biological. It can be seen from three sides: as a reflection of humanity; as one of humanity's self-imposed

constraints; and, most recently, as the site of physical consequences of an information society.



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The much-imitated BalansChair "makes it natural tolean forward w ith a straightback," according toHåg.Courtesy Håg

In the Fogg Museum exhibit for the Day Without Art,commemorating AIDS victims, chairs represent solidarityand individuality, and promise continuity. The exhibit wasthe idea of s taff member Danielle Hanrahan. Photograph byJoe Wrinn


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Every few years a designer finds another way to give a chair the semblance of a human body,

and the very lexicon of chair design suggests why designers should. Chairs are the solid

shadows of humanity and indeed of all animal life. It is not just that they have legs. They have

feet, or at least claws. At the Brooklyn Museum's recent Converging Cultures exhibit I saw a

massive Peruvian eighteenth-century ecclesiastical armchair with spooky toe joints. And the

jargon of furniture continues the metaphor. Chairs have knuckles. They have knees. They have

elbows. Chairs have seats and backs, often reverse contours of our own. They have arms,

often the size of ours. The protruding corners of Chippendale chairs are called ears. Some

African chairs have human heads carved exactly where a sitter's head might be--literally sit-insfor deities and ancestors. In a recent contest for a chair for the megastar doll Barbie, one of the

entries (according to an article by Diana Friedman in the sponsoring magazine, Metropolis) was

"a chair made from a naked version of her male counterpart, Ken, supporting her through

various adjustable, submissive positions."

Chairs even have a social life. Many seem to travel in herds, like the curious little gilt ones that are toted from one society

event to another, or they exist in stacks, like communally nesting swallows or purple martins. (Come to think of it, some

chairs have paws or hooves, and others have wings.) A French

designer, F.X. Lalanne, offers seating in the form of a herd of fleecy

sheep, and the architectural historian Vincent Scully has describedone of Robert Venturi's adaptations thus: "The flopping black

Chippendales cluster like Labradors waiting to be fed around the

table." The scattered folding chairs in a Paris park, the firmly bolted

oak seats of the jury box in what we Americans appropriately call a

county seat, the empty rows of writing chairs in an American

classroom, are stage sets for a social order. Debates over the

position of pupils' seating fill the educational journals, and even

psychoanalysts discourse at length about the differences of

interaction using couches and chairs. Indeed, a chair is a protean

prop, able to help express almost any personal relationship.

Chairs are not only gregarious creations; they are even human

surrogates. Like the prophet Elijah's reserved seat at the Passover

Seder (in a few Avignonese synagogues it is even mounted in wall

niches) or the "Vacant Chair" representing the faraway soldier in the

American Civil War song, a chair turns the missing into the present. For millions of visitors to the National Museum of

American History, Archie and Edith Bunker's chairs are Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton. On a more sinister note, at

the 1993 murder trial in absentia of the Philadelphia guru Ira Einhorn, an empty defendant's chair was retained. Above all,

the chair is a memorial, a common gravestone image of the nineteenth century. The patriarchal Puget Sound industrialist

John S. McMillan even memorialized himself and his family as a set of chairs around a dinner table.


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Doug Fitch '81 demonstrates his version of radical reclining. Designed in a sophomore

tutorial at Harvard, the chair flips over for prone reading and may be stood on end assculpture. Courtesy Doug Fitch

Yet chairs can stand for social disorder as well as order. A chair lying on its side in a painting or print like Hogarth's

Marriage à la Mode is a convention for a disordered life. The familiar eighteenth-century English political ceremony of

"chairing the member" was curiously followed by the violent dismemberment of the victorious candidate's temporary

throne--mere animal spirits or an unsubtle reminder of the crowd's ability to unmake power? Indeed, in more recentpopular culture the chair is a potent weapon that can at least plausibly keep a circus lion at bay, not to mention furnish the

cast of a classic Hollywood Western with matériel for a photogenic brawl. And for contemporary artists it can be a sinister

place in its own right: an installation by the video sculptor Tony Oursler features a man's face, delivering a recorded

religious harangue, projected onto a doll lying beneath an overturned chair.

Chairs remain potent emblems both of human variety and of common fate in our own time. Photographs of a handful of

chairs in the street have represented conflagration and survival in modern Lebanon and Bosnia. In 1989, the artist Alexis

Smith and the poet Amy Gerstler presented an exhibition of five dozen children's chairs accompanied by enigmatic

epitaphs: "a lesson in mortality," as the critic Richard Armstrong put it. And in the same year the staff of Harvard's Fogg

Museum commemorated colleagues, family members, and friends who had died of AIDS (and those living with the

disease) on the Day Without Art by assembling dozens of chairs and stools of

every kind in a gentle spiral.

In our presence, as well as in our absence, we lend our character to our chairs.

When we drape a jacket on a chair, or leave a hat on it, we even start to clothe it.

As the historian Leora Auslander has written in her new book, Taste and Power ,

choosing a chair can mean reconciling conflicting values within one's own family,

and even negotiating a new self-definition: "[Guests] respond with their

interpretations of my chair and me. I respond and am changed by their responses.

I have been made by that chair and I have made the chair."

To return to the physical, as opposed to metaphorical, chair, it is equally a double

agent. The chair arranges our bodies for presentation. In doing so, it promotes our

public selves, but it often oppresses our bodies. In his bookHome, the architect Witold Rybczynski has, correctly of course,

deplored the dysfunctional consequences of the modernist aesthetic in furniture. And it does seem hypocritical that the

Bauhaus school, which exalted industrial efficiency, should have produced structures like Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona

Chair, with its concave back, thin cushions, and massive weight, or Marcel Breuer's Wassily Chair, a cubist exercise in

chromeplated tubing and leather straps that provide even less support. (Its inspiration was reportedly the designer's bicycle

handlebars.) Not that the deep cushions of Le Corbusier's misnamed Grand Comfort Armchair are a satisfactory

alternative, however inviting its form might seem.



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Jefferson's po litical reputation may rise and

fall, but this chair with leg-rest in his study

at Monticello secures h is fame as seating

innovator.R. Lautman / Monticello


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It is easy now to smile at the modernists. Some of their buildings, like their seating,

proved remarkably dysfunctional. And as Rybczysnki recognizes, ease was

secondary to image. The "friar's chair" shown at the Brooklyn Museum exhibit,

which Spanish priests and officials brought to the New World, displays an

uncompromising squareness that imposed itself on the mind of the conquered and

was soon adopted by most of the elite among them. The high-backed chair of

authority, like certain stiff hats and formal shoes, produces effects in the user no

less than in the beholder.

Why is it so surprising that chairs should be valued for their external meanings just

as neckties and high heels continue to be, despite a century of clothing-reform

movements? The necktie is not based on ignorance of air circulation, nor the dress

shoe of podiatric health; instead, each expresses image and convention.

Modernist furniture expresses a certain this-worldly asceticism that Max Weber

ascribed to Protestantism, and a certain denial of comfort may even reinforce the

idea of fitness to rule. According to the writer Philip Weiss, Spiro Agnew avoided

leaning back in his chair to prevent creases in his suits. This consciousness of

image he shared with his late-modernist foes. Indeed, as the architectural historian

Joseph Rykwert observed, the very discomfort of the celebrated Hardoy (butterfly)

Chair was a sacrifice the owners gladly made to underscore the

antiauthoritarianism that its unstructured suspension system betokened. The chair allowed a new elite to display its

superiority to tufted, overstuffed fogies, just as Agnew's immaculately pressed look confounded the rumpled and pointy-

headed.

Of course this suffering to be beautiful or powerful or progressive has a sinister side. It is only a short step from the chair as

self-discipline to the chair as control and correction. It is interesting that a popular Chinese adaptation of European chair

design, imported into Europe in the eighteenth century, had its back in the form of a yoke. A chair is a kind of social yoke.

Those who saw the play or film of Alan Bennett's The Madness of King George will recall the sinister debut of the Reverend

Dr. Thomas Willis's specially built chair, in which the erratic king was clamped by Willis's strong-arm attendants when he

resisted the doctor's regimen. In real life the king sardonically but tellingly called it his Coronation Chair, and it differed fromthe wooden armchairs of the day mainly in having a large, flat base that effectively anchored it to the floor. Not many years

thereafter Dr. Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia patriot-physician, introduced a similar chair for the insane, augmented by a

hood. Much later, interwar Scandinavian functionalism could also be an almost sinister source of control; Grimsrud said of

the Finnish architect Alvor Aalto's "sanatorium chair" that "[i]f the patients were not already sick, then they certainly would

be" after sitting in one of them. Even today, high-tech "violent prisoner restraining chairs," with due precautions against

"positional asphyxia," appear at corrections trade shows.

A century after George III's treatment, New York State introduced the ultimate extension of Dr. Willis's clamp-fitted chair as

the medium of its first electrocution. The philosopher Arthur C. Danto speculates that a chair, rather than a table or cross or


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Harvard's presidential seat

and Mies van der Rohe's

Barcelona Chair are made of

sterner stuff.Top, Michael

Nedzweki / Harvard University

Art Museums; Bottom, The

Museum of Modern Art, New

York

noose or kneeling position, was chosen because of its dignity. A more likely answer, I think, was

that it (and later the chair-equipped California gas chamber) built on the therapeutic chairs of

Willis and Rush and others. Today's prevalent lethal injection is administered hospital-style to a

prone "patient," but in The Body in Pain Harvard professor Elaine Scarry has documented the

disturbing frequency of chairs as torture instruments in our own time. Is she right to say, though,

that this practice inverts the true function of the chair, to provide comfort? Perhaps pain is

instead the logical outcome of the search for ease. How pleasant, for example, is prolonged

sitting in an overstuffed seat, with thick cushions that restrict circulation? The Inquisitor in the

Monty Python skit may have had a point when he called for the Comfy Chair.

Is there a natural way to sit that avoids these alarming precedents? Most of the world's peoples

sat at mat or carpet level before contact with Mediterranean chair sitters. There are reasons to

believe their body techniques (in Marcel Mauss's phrase) may be healthier than those of chair

sitters. A Sudanese professor of medicine compared the eating and defecating patterns of

nomads with those of medical students in Khartoum and concluded that squatting, along with

bulkier food, reduced the rate of hemorrhoids and varicose veins among the former. Some

physical therapists have observed fewer complications in childbirth among women who have

grown up in non-chair societies. (But then again, squatting and kneeling may have pathologies

of their own. The skeletons of some peoples reveal depressions in certain bones of womenfrom prolonged kneeling in food preparation; one official of the Japanese health ministry

believes that chair sitting as well as improved nutrition has made the postwar generation

significantly taller than its parents.)

For better or worse, chairs have moved around the earth as though they had walked on their

own legs, spread not only by the Spanish friars we have noted, but (for example) by medieval

Nestorian missionaries in China, by early modern Portuguese traders in West Africa, and by

French and other diplomats in the Ottoman Empire. The famous Golden Stool of the Ashanti,

the embodiment of nationhood, was even enthroned on a chair of its own. Chairs carry us, and

we carry chairs.

At first the chair coexists with ground-level customs. For years, many Japanese households maintained both tatami and

Western rooms, with different proportions and décor as well as different seating. But this seating truce has proved

unstable. In Japan at least, younger people report increasing discomfort in the floor-seated positions as they practice them

less, a self-reinforcing cycle. Both Western reporters and at least one Japanese colleague note the decline of traditional

seating. The kneeling position of seiza, familiar in Zen meditation and in school discipline, has become harder for the

Japanese to sustain for any length of time. Nonwesterners have shifted to chair sitting not because it is a form of comfortthey had been too hidebound to invent--the Japanese used chairs for centuries in a number of settings--but because of the

chair's way of re-forming the physical as well as the social self. We make chairs and chairs make us.

We are still not quite happy with our chairs. Chairs for conversation and rest reached a high level more than 200 years ago,

and the sprung furniture of the nineteenth century may even have been a step backward. The quest for too much ease

began to threaten well-being. As the designer Karl Lagerfeld put it, "It has been said that conversation died in France when

chairs became too comfortable." The "elaborate padding of nineteenth-century upholsterers" made wit itself ponderous,

whereas "in a bergère the mind can remain lively and alert."


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Neither authority, nor conversation, nor wit is the object of today's chair; it is the manipulation of symbols on cathode ray

tubes. And here the genius of the Rococo as celebrated by critics like Rybczynski is of little help. The computer has had

some terrible unintended consequences in helping to multiply the reported rates of cumulative trauma disorders, but at

Harvard and elsewhere these problems have also had a positive effect. They have accelerated serious thinking and

research about seating.



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Nils Diffrient in his Jefferson Chair, at$6,500 the ultimate power seating of thedawning microcomputer age of the 1980s,and still in production. John Dommins /Courtesy Nils Diffrient


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In the nineteenth century, new quantities of padding and ingenious arrangements of springs attempted with varyingsuccess to assure new levels of comfort--a challenging enterprise considering the reinforced corsets of women and themany layers worn by both sexes. Most striking, though, is the casual attitude thisprogress-minded century took toward the improvement of executive and clericalsitting. Many nineteenth-century business chairs, even those of the wealthiest

industrialists, look remarkably ordinary and uncomfortable today, especially side byside with the elaborate desks of the period. Adjustments arrived only slowly.Eighteenth-century society may have sprawled and leaned on its chairs, but

nineteenth-century gentility--ever on guard against the parvenu--frowned on thisform of animation. At the start of the century, Thomas Jefferson's political

opponents, warning that "science and government are two different paths,"scorned Jefferson's "whirligig" revolving armchair, and suspicion of novel workseating persisted, among bosses and workers alike. As the cultural historian

Katherine C. Grier has written, truly adjustable furniture was largely reserved for invalids. Springy seats were prized not for easy sitting but for their embodiment of

the latest in "elastic" materials. (Were they enjoyed subconsciously as the repressed pleasure principle of the literallyuptight?)

The paradox of the twentieth-century search for the healthy seat is that it probably began not with ruling adult males butwith the perceived needs of schoolchildren and mass-transit users. The first studies of proper seating I have found aretreatises from the middle to late nineteenth century on the proper desks and chairs for elementary-school classrooms.

Transportation companies followed only a century later; the Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton conducted anextensive physical measurement program for the New Haven Railroad in the 1940s.

While today's commercial airlines seem to get their seating ideas from M.B.A.s rather than either M.F.A.s or Ph.D.s, RabCross '67, M.D., an occupational medicine specialist and certified professional ergonomist, believes that military studies of pilot seating were the first scientific treatments of the needs of machine operators as opposed to passengers or pupils. Myown search of the papers of the pioneering industrial engineer Frank Gilbreth, at the National Museum of American History,

reveals no attention to chair design, save an interesting concave footrest. Early textbooks of office practice are silent onsuch major topics as support for the lower back.

According to Cross, it was the computer that provoked the first extensive research and thinking about healthy seating in theoffice. Computers raised new questions about the proper height of seating in relation to work surface, about the optimum

position of the body, and above all about activity. The physical dangers of the computer were unprecedented. With thecomputerization of the workplace, the old-style catastrophic industrial injury caused by a single traumatic event began to


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The Great Chair, seat of patriarchy, is ergonomicenough for hard-copyoutput. FPG International

The "secretarial" chair wasonce openly marketed as awoman's ch air, unlike the"managerial" and"executive" models that

yield to a new and more insidious form of disability caused by the rapidly repeated performance of small motions and,indeed, sometimes by the absence of motion--by the fact that an operator could work for hours

without even the throwing of a typewriter carriage or a trip to replenish paper supplies or change a ribbon. Cross reports that a number of the pioneers of computer science suffered

serious disabilities from years of working in what now seem primitive conventional chairs. Nor does he consider the furniture of that golden age, the eighteenth century, much of a guide: he

reacts to a 1995 Martha Stewart Living spread of antique French furniture supporting apersonal computer system as C. Everett Koop would to a Marlboro landscape.

Today's ergonomic chairs are, from one point of view, worlds away from their origin inceremonial role and constraint. Long vanished is the attempt to enforce a single optimum

position. The chair is not so much a fixed object as a set of carefully formed and adjustableparts. A swiveling seat in Jefferson's day was a novelty. Even in the early nineteenth century,

tilting chairs (like rockers) were domestic amenities, not commercial equipment. Now office chairs afford not only changesof seat height and back reclining angle--often with back- and seat-changing positions at carefully adjusted angles--but

other degrees of freedom. The seat pan can tilt forward, as some ergonomists recommend for certain work. The positionof the lumbar support, the height of and distance between the arms, the tension of the backrest, and sometimes the depthof the seatpan are all adjustable. A few chairs have split backs. Others, like the Equa II and the sculptural new Aeron, both

lines designed by Bill Stumpf and Harry Chadwick for Herman Miller, are sized by body dimensions (small, average, andlarge) rather than by hierarchic and gender distinctions (secretarial, managerial, executive). The Steelcase Sensor, afavorite chair at Harvard, has "highback" and "midback" styles. New flexible synthetics are taking some of the role of

springs and padding.

Yet for all these innovations, the chair is still the object of unease. Some models, based on slim European bodies, lose their lumbar support when larger American bottoms push sitters up and away. The more adjustments and possible seating

positions, the more time the sitter has to take to learn them. Some employees never do. And some designers have evenconcluded that chairs should not be contoured at all, that they should be designed to encourage constant shifting. The

Rudd International Cyborg of the 1980s had a weight-activated hydraulic cylinder. As the Rudd brochure explained, "thechair itself moves, making the user move--virtually all of the time he or she is sitting in one," yet slowly enough that "[m]ost

people will find it impossible even to detect." (The maker, now Rudd Incorporated, offers a lower-priced successor calledthe Cyncro.)

The horizon of chair design seems to be the horizontal, with ever bolder reclining angles. Theoretically, if the body does notslip, a wider angle means less pressure on the spinal column. The idea is not new. Jeffersonwrote leaning back with his legs propped on a padded extension; Mark Twain and Winston

Churchill also liked to stretch out with their heads supported. The ultimate laid-back executiveseating, Nils Diffrient's Jefferson Chair, is a business lounge chair with its own table and

computer monitor support. It is less a thing than a place--at $6,500 for chair plus ottoman it wasthe world's most expensive production chair; its original manufacturer went out of business after

the stock market crash of 1987. It is now made by the Alma Group in Elkhart, Indiana, at the

same widely discounted list price. In Middle American price brackets the La-Z-Boy andBarcalounger recliner chairs, once despised by aesthetes, now earn respect from ergonomists

and designers, and may influence office chair design. (Harper's Magazine's "Index" featurerecently reported volume purchases by the CIA.) Meanwhile some chair designers report thatSilicon Valley programmers, always in the sedentary vanguard, are looking for extra recliningroom. At last the headrest, once a mere status-driven "nimbus" in the phrase of the designer

Emilio Ambasz, may actually have a function.

Paradoxically, it is the very group that inspired some of the first anatomical studies of seating--students--who are now most at risk. Rab Cross's slides of Harvard students at work, taken with


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were always shown withcomfortably sprawlingmales. Today's "assistant"has a "task" chair, still oftensmaller, with low back andno arms. FPG International

a House Master's permission, show (among other ergonomic problems) chairs utterly unsuitedfor computing. Cross, who with William A. Schaffer has published a book on personal

workplace health called ErgoWise, warns that the true cost of universities' apparent indifferencemay appear only later, in workers' compensation costs to the graduates' ultimate employers.

(Back pain is said to cost American business $6.5 billion annually.) Will Harvard, and students'parents, face yet another major investment? The chair, apparently so natural, turns out to be

one of our most complex and least understood technologies, and in one way or another one of the costliest.

Contributing editor Edward Tenner, JF '72, is a visiting researcher in the geosciences department of Princeton University

and author of Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (Knopf). He thanks the

Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars for supporting the project of which this essay is a part.


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