Bookclub

The Chair
Rethinking culture, body, and design

This book is part cultural criticism, part design study, and part celebration
of the human body. It offers a new paradigm of thinking about chairs. A
concept in which beauty, comfort and status are mixed up.

It might tempt us to conclude that chairs are a lost cause, a wrong turn
humankind took millennia ago. But the fact is that sitting in chairs is now
deeply ingrained in Western culture, and even prized as a symbol of
modernization around the world. So even if chairs should - from a purist
point of view - be abandoned because they create so many problems,
from a pragmatic point of view we need to explore how they can be fixed,
or at least improved.

1. Where did chairs come from?

2. What is a comfortable chair?
3. Why are so many chairs uncomfortable?
4. What concerns shape chair design?
5. How got Westerners so attached to chairs?

Westerners do not generally sit cross-legged or kneeling, so many of

these floors have hidden wells under the tables for diners to sit in the
classic right-angled posture we are used to. But do we accept this as a
cultural difference, created by lifetimes of sitting one way versus another?
No, we kid ourselves otherwise, with vague references to some imagined
anatomical difference. We still need anthropologists to remind us that
almost everything - including how we hold our bodies - should be
understood in its cultural context. The reasons for sitting on the floor, on
mats, on carpets, platforms, Chinese k'ang, or stools stem from cultural
traditions rather than economic or anatomic development. Since not all
peoples sit in chairs, why do we?