
I found these mint condition beauties in an antiques store
So, it appears that I may have too many chairs accumulating in my life due to an unhealthy obsession with buying them at every turn. If I could apply a little psychology to this whole situation, ( this of course being the most non-scientific example ) the chair functions as a stand-in for the human subject. Photographers of modernist achitecture would often carefully place chairs in the setting for a sense of scale. This allowed the elimination of the actual person in the image and permitted the viewer to really get a sense of the space that was being photographed. These chairs for me are not so much objects as intelligent, beautiful, “entities” that populate my space. Now why would we want fewer of those things?

Harry Bertoia
Above and below I am featuring the Harry Bertoia Side Chair in Chrome. This was designed in 1952 by Bertoia for Knoll and is still in production today. These pieces have an incredibly light aesthetic paired with a sturdy framework which defies the expectations when you sit down. It seemed Bertoia was more of a sculptor than a designer when you start to look at his body of work and this makes sense when you sit in one of these chairs. Consider this: The furniture designer starts out with function and form in mind and essentially has a head start in how the physicality of the object is handled. The starting point is prescribed in that the furniture designer says, “I will design a chair”. The function of the chair is to seat an individual and from this basis the designer moves forward. A sculptor possesses the responsibility of elevating functionless to worthiness. The sculptor’s basis for work is functionlessness and he is forced to first determin how this unknown object will first establish the connection with the viewer, how it will behave in space, and how the viewer’s body and the object will alter the space in which they both occupy and so on. I believe that this extra step in the process gives the sculptor a more intimate understanding of the object/viewer interacion. Bertoia’s chairs both challenge gravity and space in their light openness which contradicts their strong support, comfort and confidence when you sit down in them. They are truly beautiful things.
