Author(s): Anne Massey

General

We sit on one every day in our home, school or office. Yet how often do we think about the origins of the chair or of its place in the world? This book provides an anatomy of the chair and its history, and even considers the predetermined ways in which we interact with others when seated, for a chair can communicate the authority of its owner, the sitter, and even the creator. During the last one hundred years it has become established as a revered object of design. Examples, such as the Eames Lounge chair, Verner Panton's S Chair, Herman Miller's Aeron office chair, and Jasper Morrison's Air chair, have been photographed for glossy magazines, exhibited in art museums and galleries, and sometimes slavishly copied in knock-off cheaper models. Other, more humble, chairs have also reached iconic status, such as Van Gogh's chair, or like Shaker chairs have become emblematic of a simpler and purer lifestyle. Chairs have been crafted, constructed in a remarkable variety of traditional and synthetic materials, and mass manufactured, often locally but now increasingly in faraway factories for global distribution. This book elucidates the meaning of the chair in contemporary culture and of the nature of the relationship between this pivotal object and designers and manufacturers. Drawing on design and art, popular culture and personal experience, Chair is an engaging and informative biography of an everyday object, and will appeal to anyone interested in why we choose, or are made, to sit on the chairs we do.