Chairs Suck! Good Chair Design is Impossible!
Claims Colin McSwiggen in Jacobin, a NYC based internet magazine.
Collin says:
…Chairs Suck! All of them. No designer has ever made a good chair, because it is impossible. Some are better than others, but all are bad!
His piece is worth reading and gives us something to think about. Chairs can be dangerous for our health.
What makes chairs so awful for the body? That’s a complicated question to answer, because different chairs get different things wrong. Uncomfortable chairs typically put adverse pressure on some part of the body or require excessive muscular work in order to sit. This can cause soreness and encourage the sitter to adopt slouched postures that restrict circulation, impede respiratory and intestinal function, and lead to musculoskeletal injuries.
Comfy chairs are even worse. By encouraging the sitter to remain in a single static position for long durations without moving, they put extended, unrelieved stress on the spine, weaken the muscles that support the body’s frame and prevent injury, and cause the same circulatory problems as their less comfortable counterparts. And that’s just the beginning.
He continues with a long piece that chairs are thrown upon us by our rulers and by the industrial revolution.
Ha, interesting! Would be cool if some designer reads it and creates a perfect chair. Or of some doctor reads it and determines what the perfect chair is lol
« Une chaise, par exemple, ne doit être ni horizontale, ni verticale, ni expressionniste, ni constructiviste, ni être fabriquée pour des questions de convenance, ni s’assortir de la table à laquelle elle est associée, il doit être un bonne chaise et alors il va avec la bonne table ». Marcel Breuer (form & funktion)
So where is the table associated with this good chair ?
@The_Milanese
There is no table with this Pouf. I saw it last year and featured it as Seat Down, Please Pouf by Maria Kymosova at 2011 IMM Cologne (7)
Anyone interested in this argument should read the book “the chair” very interesting … Certainly changed my view as a furniture designer a few years back
@ Benjamin
I take it you mean this book:
The Chair Rethinking Culture Design by Galan Cranz?
Seems a good read. Thanks for the pointer.
@ Guido
… Correct!
@Julia, check the work of Neri Oxman at the MIT,
http://web.media.mit.edu/~neri/site/projects/beast/beast.html