The Perfect Seat

For Dell Texmo, owner of Living Rooms, one of the finest interior design stores in St. John’s, searching out the perfect chair is one of the perks of her profession. She often tests out chairs at furniture trade shows, among other places. “If I see something that looks good, I still want it to be comfortable,” she explains. “If it doesn’t pass the comfort criteria, I walk.” Then there is the other side of the equation. “Have you ever sat in a glider rocker? ” she asks, her voice tinged with disgust. “Boy, are they ugly: buttons on the back, maple wood bits. But when you sit in the darn things, they’re just so wonderful. Of course, I’d never give them floor space.”

What she does give space to are chairs made and designed in North America, with additional items stocked from overseas. For Texmo, chairs must realize their function, whether they’re designed for dining, working, or lounging. “There’s a George Eliot character who mentions salt in soup,” she starts, revealing her background in English literature. “You don’t notice salt when it’s there, you only notice it when there is either too much of it or too little. The same can be said for chairs. They’re so simple that we often take them for granted and only notice them when something is wrong.” Misplaced tuxedo arms; confused, slippery upholstery; or seats with “flat, nasty pieces of foam,” as Texmo puts it — these are only some of the embarrassments that have arisen in the chair’s long lineage.

Chairs have always been seen as a complex design challenge. Among the scads of very wrong chairs that have sullied the long and otherwise noble history of this quotidian object, a few symbols of perfection have emerged — epitomes of what it truly means to sit down. In the twentieth century, for example, Wassily (1925), the creation of architect and designer Marcel Breuer, emerged as a Modernist celebration of industry and progress. The first chair to be made out of bent steel tubes, this leather-wrapped seat was named after Breuer’s friend, the painter Wassily Kandinsky. “It is my most extreme work both in its outward appearance and in the use of materials,” Breuer once said. “It is the least artistic, the most logical, the least ‘cosy’ and the most mechanical.” Logic and mechanics underscored most of the century’s seminal designs: Gerrit Rietveld’s Red and Blue (1918); Mies van der Rohe’s hugely influential Barcelona (1929); Le Corbusier’s Grand Confort (1928); Charles and Ray Eames’s wood-laminate innovations; Eero Saarinen’s ever-blossoming Tulip (1956). For these chairs and others, clean lines and forms melded with new materials to help salvage design from the grips of the nineteenth century’s repressive classical revival.

“I am obsessed with chairs,” declares award-winning furniture designer Andrew Jones of Toronto, calling them the most challenging objects to design. “They are about the complexities of the body, but not just the physical ones,” he says. “Chairs are also about the psychophysical, where the touch and feel are as important.” Jones feels compelled to take a health-focused approach to design. “Chairs are terrible things,” he insists, citing problems such as back troubles, constricted circulation, and carpal tunnel syndrome as proof that people really aren’t built for sitting down. “We’re meant to move around,” he says. This and other ergonomic truths have worked their way into many of Jones’s designs. “I try to design chairs with shapes that support a person rather than hold them in one place, so that you can swivel your legs, pivot back, slouch forward, sit up straight. I like to allow for a lot of different possibilities.” His award-winning Olo chair, as well as his Gym, Ripple, and Woodrow, follow from this philosophy, with flexible wood and plastic curved edges and careful proportions allowing for freedom while seated. For Jones, “well-designed” means a spare, linear honesty, while putting comfort first.

But what we consider comfortable is changing, and today’s innovative designers are expanding the very definition of comfort. Not only is it about holistic bodily comfort, it’s also about being comfortable with the materials used in the chairs, and with how those materials are extracted. Call it what you will — mindful living, treading lightly, greening, wellness, conscious consumption — many designers will no longer stand for materials that don’t meet their environmental criteria.

“Right now, we make materials through heat, beat, and treat,” says Jones, who has been immersing himself in research on sustainable design, looking for ways to use healthy, non-toxic, reusable materials — the key components of psychological comfort. This is, if you will, the twenty-first century’s own revolution against the Industrial.

So where does this leave our asses? From the Neolithic era to the present-day, chairs are our loyal partners, supporting us, holding us, rocking us at all hours, ugly bits and all. From the reflective, to the behavioural, and finally to the visceral, our reactions to design are manifold and unpredictable. What makes a perfect chair? There is no single answer, just a slew of variables. The formula might look something like this: (h + i) x (f + e) x (r + v + b) / x, accounting for historical resonance, innovation, function, experimentation, and the reflective, visceral, and behavioural reactions to design. But the equation hinges, finally, on the perpetual X factor of our finest asset, the all-telling and most likely imperfect derrière.