PLEASE HAVE A SEAT: A TALE OF CHAIRS IN MULTIPLE ACTS

"The concept of connections is intrinsic to design and nowhere more so than in the design of chairs. No other type of furniture offers the possibilities of making and facilitating connections in the same way or to the same extent." Thus wrote Charlotte and Peter Fiell in their introduction to 1000 Chairs, their famous book dedicated to the chair, the first edition of which was published in 1997.

To introduce the subject of this essay, please use your imagination to perform a short exercise. Close your eyes and sketch an imaginary chair. What an amazing number of shapes, lines, materials, and techniques! Traditional and discreet chairs, of the kind that, if one dares to say, fulfill their humble function, disseminated around the world in a symphony of backs, seats, and quartets of tubular legs firmly planted on the ground.

There are chairs that have been designed to safely guarantee this purpose, as Ettore Sottsass tautologically suggests in the series of pictures in Metafore (1972-79), immortalizing a rustic chair in the rocky landscape of the Apuane Alps. But alongside them are more inviting chairs, and more austere armchairs whose solid silhouettes arouse fear. The action and the object of sitting, the action and the object to be able to exert the power of those who sit: Do you wish to sit… or would you prefer a throne? (1976). Far from offering itself to the rationale of Neocapitalism, with its natural reserve, the chair winks, it weaves situations, it facilitates the hybridization between disciplines. Let's say it under our breath: not all objects wish to peacefully exercise the role they have been invested with. An example of this is offered by Bruno Munari with his Chair for Very Short Visits, designed in 1945, just as WWII was drawing to a close. The seat of this object with slender legs features an angle that is completely impractical, making it impossible for anyone to use it for more than a few seconds. A consciously rebellious chair. About thirty years later, with a wholly different intent, Enzo Mari came along with his compendium dedicated to self-design. Not only must the chair be for everyone, but even the process to build it becomes a collective exercise, a programmed rhythm of gestures and standardized components through which to breathe life into a multitude of perfectly functional objects.

One might say that dealing with chairs means dealing with stories, local narratives, personal and community ones that intersect different latitudes, unveiling legacies that are all but secondary. The first story I would like to tell touches the realms of both the history of art and that of design. In 1969 Afra and Tobia Scarpa designed the Soriana armchair. During those same years in the United States John Chamberlain was shaping sculptures made of polyurethane foam – or perhaps we should say he allowed the foam to be shaped by the pressure of a nylon cord. Proving that they were remarkably receptive to experimenting with the most futuristic of materials, Afra and Tobia Scarpa developed a revolutionary chair whose morphology was oriented by the specificity of the polyurethane foam. A metallic clasp and an internal support gave the very soft chair upholstered in fabric a sinusoidal profile, an entirely curvy one. The most recent version of Soriana produced by Cassina has replaced the expanded polyurethane with Biofoam of plant origin: the same ductility but now environmetally friendly.

A decade later, in 1969, Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni designed the chair Lierna. Produced by Zanotta, to Scarpa's "stapling" it preferred the elasticity of wood covered with foam rubber and the dry verticality of the frame. As Castiglioni himself recalls, the chair and its particular zigzag shape aimed to favor the microcosm consisting of gestures, postures, and conventional dynamics that are consumed in the lively perimeter of a table set for dining. The object, a creature masterfully crafted by using the "Castiglioni method" interweaves a network of spatial relations between "conviviality and conventuality," allowing the  diner to adjust to the circumstance of the meal. But also need to take a leap forward geographically and immersing ourselves in the Latin American light. At first with the Mexican Luis Barragan, a master at orchestrating the volumes, at modulating the light and the shadow, at materializing the color. To the "neoplastic" lexicon of the orthogonal lines of Casa Barragán, built in 1948 on General Francisco Ramírez Street in Mexico City, Barragán prefers the soothing poetics of the asymptotical curve in his model for the Miguelito chair. Designed in 1951 and carved in cypress wood with cognac leather upholstery for the back, Miguelito re-semantisizes the Modernist lexicon in light of the traditional Mexican forms and techniques, breathing life into a component that, with its quiet simplicity, projects synchronic episodes in the fabric of time. The result of this is the desire to reinvent a vocabulary of Western and Eurocentric origin that offers a vital turning point to the developments in the history of architecture and design seen as stories about frontiers and movement. 

This same interweaving can be found in Rocking Chair, a splendid object designed in 1948 by Achillina Bo, universally known as Lina Bo Bardi, and produced by Studio d’Arte Palma. The Roman architect who moved to Rome in 1946 breached the ranks of the so-called Paulist Brutalism. Bo Bardi accompanied the transversal use of coarse concrete with her experiments with local materials and techniques directed toward "regionalism" that was anything but unengaged. The self-contained Rocking Chair, shaped out of the thickness of the plywood, created a design of lines in which Modernism was forced to come to terms with the specificity of the territory and its history.   

Amidst the patterns of the modern, it has been said, chairs connect. They join the members of a meal, or connect the individual to the pages of the book they are reading. In other words, they generate invisible nodes and junctures that are often destined to not be untangled in time. This assumes a cultural value that wavers between the hemispheres of the globe, and is especially true of the set of Rationalist chairs designed by Gino Levi Montalcini and Giuseppe Pagani in 1930 and structured according to the austere rigor of the rectilinear element.  And with the exemplary Stringa (1965) by Gae Aulenti, the chair even goes so far as to "turn itself into" a sofa, featuring leather upholstery to decorate the elegantly flexible edges. The Africa series by the Scarpas, husband and wife, is imposing in its totemic presence, accounting for an extra-European fascination that was for a long time (and problematically so) experienced by post-industrial society. A repertory of volumes, as can be intuited, that are potentially inexhaustible. I will end this excursus with the present and the constellation of round units featured in Macaron (2023), soft chairs designed by the Israeli designer Gal Gaon that invite the user to float inside a Pleiades of chairs.

The intercultural journey has come to an end. You can open their eyes now, if you want to: which chair would you like to "connect with"?