What is a chair?
To the layman the answer seems as self-evident as which way is up. To those who have tried to design one the solution is more complicated. Says Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: "A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous." With no Chippendale to turn to, more and more modern architects are trying their hands at the designer's art, turning out a new kind of furniture to fill the empty rooms of their new buildings. The result is a family of modern classics in furniture, from bubble lamps to chrome-legged ottomans (see color page), that completes the modern picture as harmoniously as Sheraton and Chippendale fitted the classic Georgian settings of their day.
The Adjustable Back. The great-grandfather of most modern furniture is Britain's famed igth century "Morris" chair with its familiar adjustable back, named for William Morris, leader in the protest against the machine-made monstrosities of his day. But it was Frank Lloyd Wright who rang in the modern age by demanding at the turn of the century "the right use of our great substitute for tools—Machines."
Wright's cry was taken up in the 1920s by Germany's bustling, experimental Bauhaus School under Walter Gropius. It was at the Bauhaus that Architect Marcel Breuer designed the first chrome metal chair, whose descendants now populate the land as lawn or kitchen furniture. In Berlin, Mies van der Rohe first developed the cantilever metal chair, went on to produce the famed "Barcelona" chair, designed for his sumptuous German Pavilion at Barcelona's 1929 International Exposition. For the Barcelona chair he used chrome-plated stainless steel, covered the cushions with sumptuous kid leather. Cost of the chair today, done in hand-sewn natural leather: $495.
The Potato Chip. Once Mies had demonstrated that a chair's metal frame could be used in place of springs, Finland's Alvar Aalto showed that the same thing could be done with molded plywood. In the U.S., Architect Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames teamed up in 1940 to produce a molded plywood chair that shifted the emphasis to organic shape, form-fitted to the human body. Using molded plastic, Saarinen then developed the idea into his famed "womb" chair; Eames evolved a whole series, ranging from his early hard-surfaced plywood "potato chip" chair to plastic chairs which dovetail into stacks for storage, that today makes him a modern bestseller and last week earned him the American Institute of Architects' Craftsmanship Medal.
As modern U.S. architecture is now dividing between the skeletal slabs on one hand and voluminous concrete-shell structures on the other, so is the architects' furniture. George Nelson's "coconut" chair uses a sheet-metal shell over which leather or plastic is stretched to get a three-dimensional object that is pleasing to look at from any direction, even from the bottom. Standing with the cubist purists is Mies-trained Architect Florence Knoll (widow of Designer Hans Knoll). Designing simple benches, storage cabinets, desks and tables, each rigidly engineered and precisely designed, she has built a modern setting that quietly reaffirms Mies's famed dictum that "less is more."