For this issue, I’m doing something a little different. My friend Christene Barberich— who publishes the rich, varied, vintage-heavy, home and fashion Substack A Tiny Apt.—quizzed me about “statement chairs” for a recent installment of her newsletter, and I’m riffing on that theme.
For background: I was an architecture and design editor for a dozen years, which is shorthand for “eyeballing a lot of chairs.” Sometimes it was a warehouse full of chairs (the Schaudepot on Vitra's Basel campus, in particular*). It could mean a palazzo stacked with chairs (during every Salone), or a convention center lined with booths chockablock with chairs (from Frankfurt to Paris to New York to Brooklyn to High Point to Chicago to LA). I used to have stress dreams wherein I'd be ushered into a room of chairs and commanded to identify each of them by name and designer.
Now I happen to work for a design company renowned for its furniture, many of them chairs. My professional role—brand creative director—demands more of a perspective on the connective tissue between these various designs and less focus on an individual chair itself. However, we all have opinions. As the wise Ralph Caplan wrote in the book Chair (shown above), “Sitting, I thought, is what a chair is for. But it isn’t, not necessarily. The function of a chair may be to fill a corner, dress up a room, keep a table from looking unattended, organize space, impress people, depress people.”
As I told Christene when she asked me what qualities are essential to reach statement chair status, there are workhorses and there are show ponies, and we are seeking exclusively show ponies in this department. A statement chair is the thing anyone walking into your house is immediately drawn to. And there's probably something irrational about it that made you (perhaps improbably) fall in love with in the first place.
A chair should be a kind of humble object, in that its primary function (SITTING) can be achieved on any number of other things: dirt, a rock, a window ledge. The turn toward "statement chair" could not have happened without the modernists, who started designing chairs as an innovation and when successful, those became the archetypal “classics” we know today. Those newfangled chairs often didn't look anything like a chair as we previously knew it: think Eames LCW in molded plywood and Saarinen's molded Tulip Chair. (Two chairs with famously originated from the same experiment: Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen were friends and collaborators at Cranbrook in the late ‘30s; they proposed some chair designs for a MoMA exhibition on "organic" home furnishings in 1941, and it was those designs that inspired the forms later realized by Herman Miller and Knoll, respectively.) Verner Panton’s cantilevered chair also springs to mind.
Sorry-not sorry to wax on about the modernists, but a key element of this statement chair scenario is giving it room to breathe in physical space. This commitment to considering furniture within architecture as a whole** allowed for careful curation of something like chairs, as well as the space—and negative space!—to spotlight them properly.
This is an important point if you want to avoid the decor style we’ll call Stuff In A Room. Too many statement chairs does not a pleasing environment make. Pick one or two! Otherwise your interior broadcasts less “this is my personal taste” and more “flavor of the week.” Related reading: friend FOR_SCALE delves in to this particular scenario-to-avoid in a treatise on the “Frankenchair.”
Moving on, a short list of my personal favorites when it comes to statement chairs. Nothing here is upholstered, and that’s on purpose as my tendency is to focus on examples in which material = structure. While it’s too hard to whittle down to a definitive top ten (I’ve tried….), here a few to keep in mind when assembling your own fantasy chair team:
The Anti-Statement: Crate chair by Gerrit Reitveld, 1934
The Double-Take Statement: A63F chair by Josef Frank for Thonet, 1929
The Look-Don’t-Touch Statement: Corallo armchair by Humberto and Fernando Campana, 2004
The Blink-and-You’ll-Miss-It Statement: Glass chair by Shiro Kuramata, 1976
The Convalescent Statement: Paimio Chair by Alvar Aalto, 1931
The Questionable Taste Statement: Chippendale chair by Venturi Scott Brown, 1984
Odds and ends
Ronan Bouroullec for Homme Plissé Issey Miyake: perfect collaboration, no notes. I cannot stop thinking about how I want to ruffle those “All Over” pleats.
The very format of a bolster pillow lends itself to quirk, and I am here for it. LOL at LA designer Sally Breer calling it “essentially a pregnancy pillow.”
This KQED segment with a UC Berkeley professor on why cults fascinate us
Stainless steel kitchens have seen a strong uptick in media coverage of late (ahem), and this “High-Tech country kitchen” on Sight Unseen is a stellar example of the genre
Big thanks to pal Lauren Mechling for getting my head back into reading. Lauren has a unique ability to matchmake book to reader—and, lucky us!— sometimes posts thematic lists for public consumption.
I’ve seen a not-small number of breathless posts citing a recent podcast interview on “developing your own taste.” The irony here is in the willful participation in the cultural recommendation algorithm. Sharing things ad nauseum with no interpretation, translation, context, or judgment attached is just contributing to all this machine learning. While we’ve all been guilty of this, I do think it’s important to recognize criticism as an inherently anti-algorithmic viewpoint, which is why I am linking to this NPR review of the book featured on aforementioned podcast.
I fell in love with a painting this month and went down a rabbithole to learn about the artist, Emma Amos. The painting in question, Three Figures from 1966, was just on view in Memphis at the Dixon as part of a group show titled “Black Artists in America: From Civil Rights to the Bicentennial.”
One last item of business: I'm flirting with a new name for this publication. Yay? Nay? My emails are open.
Until next time!
Kelsey
That podcast ep; lol. Nothing like listening to two extremely online(TM) thirty-something dudes discussing their shocking revelation that you can, in fact, find things you like on your own! It was a startling self-own for both of them, revealing just how very limited their own curiosity is to taking the easy (algorithmically fed) way forward. The implicit "we" in Chayka's cultural criticism always irritates me, though; he speaks so sweepingly, but it is for such a very narrow and specific group. It all struck me as deeply sad, esp. for people in the business of cultural commentary.
Getting a peek at your journal makes me GIDDY. Thank you so much for taking us on this chair journey....you have such a way of reminding me/us, in a totally invigorating way, why a thing is so much more than a THING. Bravo....and yay chairs! Xx