DECEMBER 2012

YOONKYUNG YOO

3 representative materials for chair

The chair is known for its antiquity and simplicity, although for many centuries it was an article of state and dignity rather than an article of ordinary use. “The chair” is still

extensively used as the emblem of authority in the House of Commons in the United Kingdom and Canada, and in many other settings. Committees, boards of direc-

tors, and academic departments all have a ‘chairman’. Endowed professorships are referred to as chairs. In fact, it was not until the 16th century that it

became common anywhere. Until then the chest, the bench and the stool were the ordinary seats of everyday life, and the number of chairs

which have survived from an earlier date is exceedingly limited; most examples are of ecclesiastical or seigneurial origin. Our

knowledge of the chairs of remote antiquity is derived almost entirely from monuments, sculpture and paintings. Chairs

were in existence since at least the Early Dynasty Pe-riod. They were covered with cloth or leather, were

made of carved wood and were much lower than today’s chairs, chair seats were sometimes only

25 cm high. In ancient Egypt chairs appear to have been of great richness and splen-

dor. Generally speaking, the higher ranked an individual was, the

taller and more sumptuous was the chair he sat on and the

greater the honor. On state occasions the pharaoh

sat on a throne, often with a little

footstool in front of it.

De-sign

considera-tions for chairs

have been codified into standards. ISO

9241, “Ergonomic re-quirements for office work

with visual display terminals. Chair design considers intended

usage, ergonomics (how comfort-able it is for the occupant), as well as

non-ergonomic functional requirements such as size, stackability, foldability, weight,

durability, stain resistance and artistic design. Intended usage determines the desired seating posi-

tion. “Task chairs”, or any chair intended for people to work at a desk or table, including dining chairs, can only

recline very slightly; otherwise the occupant is too far away from the desk or table. Dental chairs are necessarily reclined.

Easy chairs for watching television or movies are somewhere in between depending on the height of the screen.

Ergonomic design distributes the weight of the occupant to various parts of the body. A seat that is higher results in dangling feet and increased

pressure on the underside of the knees (“popliteal fold”). It may also result in no weight on the feet which means more weight elsewhere. A lower seat

may shift too much weight to the “seat bones” (“ischial tuberosities”). For adjustable chairs, such as an office chair, the aforementioned principles are applied in adjusting

the chair to the individual occupant. Chairs may be rated by the length of time that they may be used comfortably — an 8-hour chair, a 24-hour chair, and so on.

shape

function

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Charles and Ray Eames devoted much of their creative lives to developing objucts and furniture that could be mass-produced and sold at affordable prices. An exception, however, was the luxurious 1956 Eames 670 inspired by the traditional English club chair and produced with a matching ottoman. Despite such sybaritic connotations, however, Charles wrote that his intention was to create a chair with the ‘warm, receptive look of a well-used first baseman’s mitt’. The 670 lounge chair essentially consists of three shells-the headrest, the back-rest and the seat-each made from five fused layers of plywood plus two layers of Brazilian rosewood veneer. The armrests made the same innovative use of shock mountsss that the couple had emplyed in designs of a decade earlier. Unusually, too, the upholstery was attached to the chair seat by a zipper. As with other Eames designs, the 670 quickly generated a host of low-quality imi-tations. Nevertheless, the chair has had an enormous impact on the development of fur-niture design right across the spectrum-from bachelor pad to boardroom, a new look was launched that combined utility, modernity and black-leather comfort.

EAMES LOUNGE CHAIR - THE 670

LOUNGE CHAIR - WOOD

Soon after their arrival in the forward-thinking and optimistic Los Angeles of the early 1940s, husband and wife Charles (1907-78) and Ray (1912-88) Eames be-

gan experimenting with plywood structures. Using wood and glue smuggled out of the MGM Studio workshops, where Charles worked as a film-set designer, they laminated away in the seclusion of their apartment. By 1945 they had created a coded range of furniture that included the DCW (Dining Chair Wood) and LCW (Lounge Chair Wood). The couples’ initial intention had been to fashion the seat and backrest out of a single angled sheet. However, the plywood proved prone to cracking when bent at such a sharp angle, and their solution was to split the form into a separate seat and backrest foined by an elegant twisting plywood spine. Rubber fixings at the joints allowed for a slight flexing that could respond to the body shape of the sittier - a pio neering feature that demonstraaated the Eames’ determination to design furniture that was as good to use as it was good to look at and cheap to buy.Robust, comfortable and refreshingly affordable, the LCW was the perfect chair for the United States’s growing population of homemaking young families in the post-World War 2 era. For the Eames, it proved the major breakthrough in their career.

Charles &Ray Eames

W i t h a g r a n d s e n s e o f a d v e n t u r e , C h a r l e s a n d R a y E a m e s t u r n e d t h e i r c u r i o s i t y a n d b o u n d l e s s e n t h u s i a s m i n t o c r e a t i o n s t h a t e s t a b l i s h e d t h e m a s a t r u l y g r e a t h u s b a n d - a n d - w i f e d e s i g n t e a m . T h e i r u n i q u e s y n e r g y l e d t o a w h o l e n e w l o o k i n f u r n i -t u r e . L e a n a n d m o d e r n . P l a y f u l a n d f u n c t i o n a l . S l e e k , s o p h i s t i -c a t e d , a n d b e a u t i f u l l y s i m p l e . T h a t w a s a n d i s t h e “ E a m e s l o o k . ”

N o t o n l y d i d C H A R L E S E A M E S ( 1 9 0 7 - 1 9 7 8 ) a n d h i s w i f e , R AY ( 1 9 1 2 - 1 9 8 8 ) d e s i g n s o m e o f t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t e x a m -p l e s o f 2 0 t h c e n t u r y f u r n i t u r e , t h e y a l s o a p p l i e d t h e i r t a l e n t s t o d e v i s i n g i n g e n i o u s c h i l d r e n ’ s t o y s , p u z z l e s , f i l m s , e x g i b i -t i o n s a n d s u c h i c o n i c m i d - 2 0 t h c e n t u r y L o s A n g e l e s b u i l d i n g s a s t h e E a m e s h o u s e a n d E n t e n z a h o u s e i n P a c i f i c P a l i s a d e s .

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