The Danish Chair: An International Affair
In May, my wife and I traveled to Budapest and København; two wildly different cities, each with their own quirks and charms.
Budapest’s rich history of conquests, reconquests and rebuilding paired eclectic architectural styles with a delightfully modern gastropub & coffee bar culture. Not to mention the best sandwich I’ve ever eaten. It’s almost worth traveling to Budapest just for their sandwiches.
In København, between strolling the canal walks and watching the sunset over the Opera House, we visited the Design Museum Danmark on a whim.
I revelled in the collection of exhibitions (from Japan’s influence on Danish design to the evolution of fashion & fabric since the 1700s) while my wife sighed heavily, rolling her eyes before she quickly moved into the next room.
After walking through a room showcasing the impact of American Shaker rocking chairs on Danish furniture, she crossed through a doorway covered by vinyl flaps — like the ones you’d see in a walk-in freezer — before quickly exiting with a gasp.
She grabbed my arm and expressed excitement for the first time in the museum:
You have to check this out! This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen
But before we pass through those vinyl flaps, let’s take a small diversion to Ancient Greece.
In college, I took a course on the History of Theater. At the beginning of the lecture, Dr. O’Hara placed an object on the top of one of the student’s work tables. “What is this?” he asked, pointing to the object resting on the tabletop.
The 100 or so students unanimously agreed: “it’s a chair.” Easiest test we ever had in that class.
“All right.” he said before exiting the lecture hall. He quickly returned with an ornate, dark grey armchair.
“And what is this?”
The lecture hall again agreed: “It’s another chair!”
The armchair’s sweeping back, fabric upholstery and comfortable cushions stood in stark contrast with the drab, utilitarian, cracked molded plastic seat on the tabletop.
“How do you know?” he asked. “They look nothing alike! But none of you has any doubt that each of these are Chairs?”
We couldn’t quite explain how or why we knew both objects were chairs. There had to be something to explain our innate, shared knowledge.
He then explained to us Plato’s Allegory of the Cave — how these dissimilar objects shared a common truth. The two chairs we saw were of the same Platonic Ideal of a Chair; it was only their shadows cast on the cave wall that were different.
Sometimes a ridiculous or trivial event imprints on your brain, and this was one of those times for me. My baseline for understanding the philosophy of Forms is firmly grounded in the Nature of Chairiness.
As I passed through the vinyl-flapped threshold, I saw a dark hallway. A projector at the end of the hall showed documentary footage of a factory manufacturing chairs and other furniture. Along each wall were 150 distinct chairs, framed like works of art in dimmed boxes.
It was hard to not feel like we’d entered an empty amphitheater; a crowd just beyond the far flaps waited to swarm the room and snatch the best seats in the house.
Amping the eeriness was the motion-activated lighting. Single columns of chairs illuminated as we walked through the exhibit.
Each chair demanded our rapt attention, begging us to experience its curves, insisting we understand the function of this particular design.
Full sections of chairs showed the evolution of a design aesthetic.
Arched, sweeping backs with intricate spindles led to curved top rails.
Spindles were bisected, then replaced, by mid-rails.
Rails became more elaborate then evolved into splats.
Splats expanded and filled in to close the back of the chair.
But why do we care about chairs?
Why is so much Danish design tied to furniture and chairs specifically?
Why is there a permanent exhibition to hundreds of chairs in the Danish Design Museum?
Let’s start with a quote from Ludvig Mies van der Rohe, the progenitor of the Second Chicago School of Architecture and contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.
The chair is a very difficult object. Everyone who has ever tried to make one knows that. There are endless possibilities and many problems. The chair has to be light, it has to be strong, it has to be comfortable. It is almost easier to build a skyscraper than a chair.
Kaare Klint (left) apprenticed as a furniture maker in the late 1890s and later worked with his architect father.
In 1914, he designed the Faaborg Chair; his first step in a long career of furniture design.
In 1924, Klint founded the School of Furniture Design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, spurring Denmark’s Golden Age of Furniture Design. Klint’s school was part of the College of Architecture, intertwining Furniture and Architecture in the design community.
Klint’s philosophy on furniture design was that a furniture designer should base his/her designs on tried and tested historical types of chairs, then refine and adapt them to the current age:
A chair [should come] from a good family.
Above, three of Klint’s most popular designs: the Faaborg Chair (1914, top left), the Propellor Stool (1927, bottom left) and the Safari Chair (1933, right).
Hans J. Wegner trained as a cabinet maker before moving into furniture design. Throughout his career, he created over 500 chair designs and pushed Mid-Century Modern Danish Design to an international audience.
A chair should have no back side. It should be beautiful from all sides and angles.
One of Wegner’s first designs, named simply The Chair (1948, top left), earned a place in the Museum of Modern Art’s Low-Cost Furniture design competition.
The Wishbone Chair (1950, bottom left) came to exemplify Wegner’s design aesthetic with its clean construction, elegantly tapered lines and visual warmth.
His Shell Chair (1963, right) was considered too avant garde at its introduction and didn’t garner much attention or support. However, it was re-released in 1998 to immediate broad appeal and several design awards.
Back to the exhibit itself, the chairs were displayed alongside others with a common theme. The Bow chair (1963, Grete Jalk) is one of my favorites. It smoothly subverts the visuals of a traditional “chair”, while clearly retaining function and essence. Seen directly above Wegner’s Shell Chair, the pair helps us understand how far Chairiness was being pushed in the early 60s.
Orla Mølgaard-Nielsen acquired the Chinese “Hanging Lantern Chair” in 1938 while she was the head of the School of Furniture Design.
The chair features a knockdown construction that allowed it to be separated into several pieces for shipping.
This was a unique approach to furniture design at the time and directly influenced Wegner and Borge Mogensen’s designs.
I wanted to clear up the slum of legs. I wanted to make the chair all one thing again.
Eero Saarinen’s tulip chair (1955, ab0ve) was another of my favorites. When paired with the table of a similar design, Saarinen slays the slum of legs and provides a comfortable dining area.
We’d discovered the Tulip base design a few years ago as we were searching for a dining table to replace the well-worn, but well-loved, table I’d purchased in college. I love the table, but I’m not looking forward to moving the 300 lbs. slab of marble out of our 3rd story walk up.
As soon as we got back, I knew I wanted to share this experience with as many people as I could. I’ve always been a curious person, absorbing information and knowledge whether I thought I could immediately apply it in my day-to-day life or not.
I particularly enjoyed this exhibition because it forced me to consider the evolution of chair design, a subject far afield from my professional life or anything I’d worked with in the past.
But I couldn’t nail down why was this interesting enough to present to my colleagues in our weekly Show and Tell meeting, let alone write a blog post.
So, I’ve been ruminating on this blog post for about three months now (how is it almost September already‽), looking to see how I would be able to practically apply knowledge of Chair Design.
Maybe it was the marriage of Architecture and Furniture Design. I like how the cross-disciplinary approach pushes the design language to provide aesthetically pleasing environments but stays firmly rooted in the familiar.
A chair should come from a good family just like everything else we do. A familiar foundation, but a new horizon.
