Please Be Seated: In Praise of Chairs
This article is part of Not In Milan, a multi-media festival of culture running alongside Milan Design Week.
Growing up in New York City, my life has been defined by movement. Why be home when I could be out and about, venturing through the urban expanse? This city taught me to be light on my feet, one step ahead, always ready for a quick entrance or a swift exit. The forever-grinding mindset: If I’m not on my way somewhere, I’m moving too slow. There is always a meeting to make, a dinner to attend, an anxiety-prodded jog to run. I’m not the first to figure out that motion is fuel for thinking: Charles Darwin built a “thinking path” at his home in Kent to walk on while writing his foundational texts on evolution. Standing desks, once ridiculed, now seem all the more popular for WFH-ers. Neuroscientists and mental health professionals have come to the conclusion (as have I) that moving is good for the mind. Still, I don’t want to pace around my apartment for the rest of my life, gears turning, thinking through this work issue or that personal problem. At some point, I’ve got to chill out. At some point, I need to take a seat.
But what to take a seat on? How could a guy who reads five articles a month solely dedicated to the best white T-shirts of the season, whose entire personality is based around knowing the difference between COMME des GARÇONS HOMME Plus and COMME des GARÇONS HOMME Deux just pick a set of brass-plated West Elm chairs and be done with it? It is difficult, this life.
So while friends have continued to lust after sneakers (like I did when I was 15) or cars (like I would if I didn’t live in New York) or watches (like I would if I didn’t have a phone), my strongest desire is chairs.
Post-pandemic, the city is teeming with vintage furniture resellers. But it was only when my roommate moved out last year, and I could finally furnish the whole apartment, that I was invited into their world. It was time for a redecoration, no, a redesign (sexier, right?). I can’t afford most of the pieces on Chairish, the furniture buyer’s Grailed, or even the boutique resellers whose Instagram pages clog my feed: Dreamy snapshots of reupholstered couches set at just the right angle to offset quirky floor lamps and molded plastic coffee tables — the ’fit pics of the furniture world. (I guess we once called them interiors?) Instead, much of my education of chair design history embarrassingly came through Facebook Marketplace, the Lyft to Craigslist’s Uber, where I refreshed constantly in hopes of finding a Fauteuil De Salon chair by Jean Prouvé for a fraction of its retail cost.
Unlike other furniture pieces, chairs were an easy acquisition: Lamps may need to be rewired or drilled into a wall, sofas might not squeeze through pre-war building doors, and wall art (@classicists) is functionless beyond aesthetic enjoyment. Chairs, as should come as no surprise, are meant to be experienced via contact. You can derive feelings from looking, but it’s only when you physically plant yourself in them that their story begins to unfurl. Staring at my empty space, I realized I was ready to be touched, ready for love at first sit.
My escapades took me through the Tri-State area, first to an empty parking lot in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, then a strange condominium off the Jersey Turnpike, and on to a loft in deep Bushwick, where I interrupted an intimate dinner between a chair seller and his girlfriend. They watched me stand up, sit down; stand, sit, lean back, and stand again, before deciding, ultimately, that the cracks in the propylene plastic were just too deep for me to live with.
Perhaps the most rewarding leg of this odyssey was in pursuit of a Louis 20 — a dining chair from designer and architect Philippe Starck, whose anthropomorphic designs are often suffused with subtle humor. Arranging to meet “Johnny” at his storage facility on the outskirts of Secaucus, New Jersey (if Secaucus can have outskirts), the man who met me looked more like a Teamster than a collector of contemporary French design. “You like chairs, huh?” he asked as we hustled down a dark corridor, the lights in the warehouse flickering erratically: “I can get you chairs.”
Arriving at his unit, he flung open the garage door. Furniture pieces were piled to the ceiling, all of it draped in opaque plastic. Ten minutes later, with still no sign of the Louis 20, Johnny barked from deep inside the storage, “You sure that’s the chair you want?,” emerging with something rather forgettable from Herman Miller. Scrunching my face, I began to try and explain how Starck’s industrial design would play neatly off my beaten parquet floors, though I was quickly waved away. But after removing half of the tables, lights, and office accessories, I finally caught a glimpse of a leg. In fact, there were two of them, which I inspected closely with my phone flashlight, looking for scratches in the chrome or discoloration on the seat. There was no need to do my up-and-down dance for this one. Once I sat in it, with its thick, voluptuous front legs, both ergonomic and anatomical, I knew she was coming home with me.
“You know this chair’s in the MoMA?” he asked. I shook my head politely and pretended to act surprised. An exchange of bills–no Venmo–and I was gone.
If the pursuit of chairs is hardly passive, the objects themselves aren’t, either. Chairs engage us in a vulnerable state, a moment of relief and rest. Material, design, shape, and structure activate us in exciting, comforting, and uncomfortable ways. Some chairs are meant to be relaxed into; plush and soft, a swaddle of sorts. Others, perhaps like those used in grade schools, place you at attention, erect and tense. For more than a century, designers have explored the physiological drama of the chair and its unique ability to contort or loosen the human form. There are, of course, the radical examples: Ceretti, Derossi & Rosso’s Pratone, in which the occupant sits or lays upon long, thick stalks of green foam — calling into question the very nature of what constitutes a chair — or contemporary sculptor’s Anna Uddenberg’s pieces for her recent show, “Continental Breakfast,” which more resemble alien-designed medical stirrups than anything approaching something we pull up to a dining table. And then there’s Alessandro Mendini’s tilted Scivolando chair, with its exaggerated dimensions that, although basic in composition, appear impossible to sit in.
While one chair might present a challenge to every bit of your being, another gives refuge; a gentleness that warms your back the way a hot shower might — the kind of chair that can soften your aura. Would Rodin’s The Thinker not look so stressed had he traded that tree stump for something with a bit of back support? In hindsight, I guess there was an obvious reason I wanted to see that $400-an-hour therapist whose patients reclined on not just any lounge chair but an Eames Lounge, upholstered not in the dull black leather they are most commonly known for but instead a beautiful sea-foam alcantara.
Many artists, whether they be fashion designers or classically trained painters, have dabbled in chair-making. Perhaps they, too, see the beauty of the chair as a vessel in which to prompt a psychological response. At its simplest, a chair is just a frame meant to relieve our bodies from bearing our burdensome weight. At its most meta, the chair is the shape of our thoughts.
Intersecting design, utility, art, and emotion, the chair, I discovered, could expand my world. This isn’t an exaggerated form of retail therapy, I told my more appropriately-priced therapist over Zoom from the comfort of my tufted Charles Pollock Executive. I’m actually creating new pathways for feeling, new techniques for unraveling myself. Simply by stretching the variety of seated positions my new acquisitions obliged me to take, I was asking tougher questions of myself, wrestling with id and ego. This was emotional labor, l’expression du travail émotionnel.
Somehow, in the midst of my chair craze, I had forgotten I didn’t really like sitting down in the first place. In fact, the concept of sitting down elicits complicated feelings. If I am sitting, I am still. This is something I struggle with. Or, let’s be blunt: It’s something I’ve avoided. In stillness, questions creep in. That recent breakup, the reason I avoided calling a friend on their birthday; a fight with family that lingers in the back of my mind. Scarily, if I sit, I could start to feel sad about one of those things. Perhaps if I sit long enough in that Thonet Bentwood, I might start to understand why.
