Past form and function
A chair is not passive. That's easy to forget when you're looking at one seemingly lifeless from across the room.
Is a chair utilitarian, or something closer to art? I keep returning to this, and the longer I spend making chairs, the more I realise it's also something else entirely. A chair is designed around the human body. That's what makes it what it is. But in doing so, it takes on something in return, a posture, a stance. The shape of a good chair is organic in reaction to our own organic form.
Barbara Hepworth is one of my favourite sculptors. She talked about how you can't stand in front of a sculpture rigid; you have to move around it, respond to it with your whole body. That's true of a chair. I walk around one and it gives me something different from every angle. A chair that looks heavy feels heavy before I've even sat in it. One with a sense of lightness, tapered legs and cord instead of upholstery, is already shaping my feeling about it from across the room. The visual experience is the beginning of the relationship. And then you sit down.
“A chair that allows my posture to sink back and relax slows my thinking; one that holds me well does the opposite”.
Descartes, famous for the philosophy 'I think, therefore I am', drew a line between body and mind. Two separate things, operating alongside each other but not as one. It's a nice and simple idea, kind of like the way most people think about a chair as detached from the body that occupies it... but I'm not so sure. Change the seat angle or the rake of the back and the body responds differently. An upright dining chair keeps one forward, present. A low, reclined armchair does the opposite. A chair that allows my posture to sink back and relax slows my thinking; one that holds me well does the opposite. The influence is subtle. I don't always notice it in the moment. I just find myself sharper, or more at ease.
This is what makes chair design so fascinating to me. Not the cord pattern or even the form, though both matter. It's that a chair is one of the few objects you make that gets inside the loop between body and mind. It doesn't just sit in a room. It actually influences the disposition of the person sitting in it.
Whether that makes it furniture or art or something else entirely, I'm not sure the category matters. What matters is the effect it has upon us. Perhaps that's why so many of us have a 'favourite chair'.