A Short History of the Lawn Chair
During the onslaught of last June’s graduation activities, I managed to wrangle my family into Kepler’s Books to show them one of my favorite off-campus spots, and naturally, to attempt to con them into buying me a few books. While there, I picked up Phaidon’s Chair: 500 Designs That Mattered and flipped through some of my favorites- the Mole (which seems like an odd title at first, but actually means “soft” in Portuguese) Chair, the Egg Chair, the Living Tower Chair- but stopped cold on the Lawn Chair page. In the short time I have been interested in chair design, the lawn chair has flown under my radar, escaping attention by hiding away in the garage, laying low to the ground at concerts, and generally blending into its surroundings in all the glory of its everyday ubiquity. But I wasn’t just shocked by my delay in recognizing the common lawn chair as a beautiful, practical object- how could it be possible that no one knew the original designer of a piece of furniture that most Americans own?
In the following op-ed I’ll probe this question a little more deeply and look into the lawn chair’s underappreciated rise to unspoken fame.
Part One
The folding lawn chair, at least the iteration that I know and love, took over hundreds years of invention and design changes to be developed. Folding chairs were actually around in “ancient Egypt… and were even commonly used in churches as liturgical furniture in the Middle Ages”. More recently, folding chairs started to be patented in the 1800’s. The first patent for a folding chair was filed in 1857, the second in 1888, and the third in 1889. The fourth, though, filed in 1911 by black inventor Nathan Alexander, is the one that obviously looks like a distant cousin of the subject of this op-ed, and it is also notable for its versatility, which would become a selling point in lawn chairs later on (for different purposes, i.e. cup holders). Alexander’s folding chair had a little ingenious book holder on the back, as it was meant to be used in a makeshift church space, or any empty room where a congregation could meet. This kind of modularity with a space seems revolutionary, at least to me, and turning any outdoor space into a personal “living room” seems like the natural progression for the evolution of an easily portable folding chair. If this seems a little extreme, I’m thinking of all the times I’ve used a folding chair in an outdoor campsite, where I otherwise would have had to sit on the ground or on a picnic bench. The freedom that Nathaniel Alexander’s folding chair would eventually lead to has been a beautiful, liberating thing that my childhood, and adult life, would have been very different without.
Part Two
Every time I visit my cousins, aunts, uncles, etc. of distant Norweigan descent in Wisconsin, I see a certain type of antique-looking, rusty, metal chair scattered in front yards everywhere. It turns out that these chairs, called Shellbacks, Motels, Bouncers, and Tulips, among other fun names, are the early cousin of the lawn chair. Skip Torrans, who started reproducing Shellbacks in the early 2000’s and wrote a very niche* book about their history, describes a kind of deja vu that some people have when looking at the chair- “People kept coming up to me and acting like they already knew the chairs,” he recalled. “There was something familiar to them.”
*so niche, in fact, that Jimmy Fallon included the book in a bit
Though I wasn’t around when these chairs were in vogue, I can see that they might have stylistically influenced the folding lawn chair that we all know and love. Shellbacks are made of a stamped steel, and the arm rests and legs are usually made of curved metal tubes coated in a shiny, white patina. Their legs seem slightly too short, almost like the dimensions were tailored to the length of an average child’s legs, so they rest low to the ground. And, just like the folding lawn chair, the Shellback’s origin isn’t completely known. After researching the chair for his book, Skip Torrans determined that its first iteration was crafted in the mid-30’s, possibly by Leo Jiranek, “an industrial and furniture designer who contributed concepts to the likes of Ethan Allen and, in the 1960s, was the president of the Jiranek School of Furniture Design and Technology in Manhattan.” It appears that furniture designers who like to design icons of summer in the suburbs are either ridiculously humble or like a good mystery. I guess we’ll never really know, so onto the star of the op-ed show…
Part Three- Enter, the Folding Lawn Chair
After the Shellback Chair came the more modern, highly portable, American style lawn chair, which Frederic Arnold is said to have invented after the end of World War II in 1947. I couldn’t find evidence of him inventing it that early, however, as Arnold filed a patent for his design in 1956. The description of his patent says “Folding chairs with flexible coverings for the seat or back elements having a frame made of metal with legs pivotably connected to seat or underframe”. This patent was filed right before the height of production, when the Frederic Arnold Company was producing 14,000 of these chairs per day.
Though this isn’t exactly the design that one would call to mind when picturing a lawn chair, it seems that Arnold really was the catalyst for making these chairs more ubiquitous in daily life. The chair was lightweight, as it used bent aluminum tubing, and the back and seat parts of the chair were made out of a sewn fabric that was probably comfortable to sit in, and fine to leave outdoors when it rained. I don’t have any proof, but if Frederic Arnold was selling thousands and thousands of chairs, people must have started using them for the purposes that we associate lawn chairs with today- summer barbecues, picnics, camping, outdoor concerts, and watching fireworks on the Fourth of July.
“Portable and easy to store, the American-style Lawn Chair is the ultimate symbol of the ideal summer day, along with cold beers and smoking barbecues.”
-excerpt from Phaidon’s page on Why the American Lawn Chair matters
The lawn chair that I’ve spent so much time leading up to, designer unknown, is really not that much different than Arnold’s- it has essentially the same folding aluminum base, but the ingenious addition that I wish I could credit someone for is the use of woven plastic to cover the backs and seats that had previously been covered with a less durable fabric. Lawn Chair USA, which is a family business that manufactures replicas of the original plastic woven lawn chairs, describes a very specified industry that fell prey to globalization.
“My grandfather… owned a company that made plastic yarn and webbing. When these chairs were very popular, most of the webbing came from my grandfather’s factory,” Pokrandt said. “My father purchased that company from my grandfather. However, the lawn chairs were starting to be made overseas and the lawn chair webbing business faded.”
If anyone knew who developed the original interlocking woven plastic design, it would probably be Gary Pokrandt’s grandfather. Sadly, he is gone, and my scouring of the internet has resulted in little additional information about who the designer could have been.
Sleuthing abilities aside, it’s an amazing thing to see that these classic lawn chairs are experiencing a kind of renaissance, all due to Lawn Chair USA’s insider family knowledge and their work in bringing back the lost art of “weaving the webbing onto the seat and back” by hand. Just as lawn chairs come out of their garage-bound hibernation each spring, the Pokrandts have managed to very successfully bring the classic design out its proverbial archive “garage”. MOMA stocks the Pokrandt’s revival in their online store, which seems like a pretty good stamp of design approval, and Urban Outfitters even did a limited run collaboration with the company.
In searching and sifting through the evolution of the folding lawn chair, I discovered that other people, after sitting on folding chairs their whole lives, seemed to have sudden realizations that they are understated, underappreciated objects. Tyler Watamanuk, in a beautiful piece for Curbed called My Year of Folding Chairs, articulates this better than I ever could.
Folding chairs are a relatively unremarkable fixture of everyday life. They’re one of those objects that we all interact with over the years, but likely haven’t given any real attention or afterthought. All industrial folding chairs look relatively alike; the ones in that church basement in Brooklyn looked the same as the chairs from my high school, my childhood churches, and pretty much every other folding chair I’ve had to sit in. I never gave them a second thought until I found myself sitting in one every week…”.
Replace industrial folding chairs with lawn chairs and you’ve got my thoughts exactly… sort of. Phaidon’s book in Kepler’s opened some sort of door to “second thought” that has made me both examine how I think about everyday objects more closely, and appreciate that every part of something was designed by someone, even an anonymous someone.
It’s too bad that I was so absorbed with the plight of the unknown lawn chair designer that I forgot to con my parents into buying the Phaidon chair book for me.
