Now I Sit Me Down

Starred review from April 18, 2016
The humble chair conceals a surprising amount of world history, sociology, and art in its deceptively simple design, according to design and architecture critic Rybczynski (Mysteries of the Mall). This detailed and comprehensive history of the chair begins by asking why certain cultures sit in chairs at all. Looking at seats, from a stool used in China in the second century C.E. to Charles and Ray Eames’s now-famous 1950 plastic shell chair, Rybczynski studies the base materials and innumerable innovative techniques that designers, furniture makers, and architects have applied to the chairs that people so often take for granted. He discusses dozens of different varieties of chairs, including the curved-leg Greek klismos, the classic Chippendale wing chair, the BarcaLounger, and the world’s most ubiquitous chair: the white plastic monobloc (one-piece) patteo chair, which is cheap and remarkably versatile and adapts to almost any environment or culture. Rybczynski’s relentless curiosity is easily transferred to the reader as he astutely zeroes in on the details of what makes a chair design special or significant. This latest contribution from Rybczynski serves as further evidence that he is one of the best writers on design working today.

June 1, 2016
The acclaimed popularizer and purveyor of all things architectural scrutinizes a "tool for sitting." A man of boundless curiosity, Rybczynski (Emeritus, Architecture/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays, 2015, etc.) turns his roving eye to something found in every home: the common yet paradoxical chair, which "endures, even as it never ceases to change." But this isn't a mere design history; it's also a "chronicle of human behavior." The author is fascinated with chairs because they "address both physiology and fashion." They try to balance artistry, status, gravity, construction, and comfort. As he notes, chairs "are inanimate objects, but they speak to us." Rybczynski is particularly taken by the ancient Greek klismos chair, "considered by many to be the most graceful chair ever made." It was a beautifully proportioned chair for everyday use, a "sitting tool distilled to its essence....It's perfect." Accompanying the description is one of the author's delicate, hand-drawn illustrations, which appear throughout the book. His succinct discussion of why the ancient Chinese switched from sitting on the floor to chairs is marvelous. The "quintessential" American chair, the rocker, probably appeared in the early 1700s. By the 1820s, it was a "national fad." The "Henry Ford of chairs" is the "landmark figure" Michael Thonet. Not only did he invent a new technique for making chairs in the 19th century, he also created a way to mass-produce them. The Adirondack chair emerged in 1903, while the fold-up aluminum chair popped up in 1947 at the same time as the "stately" BarcaLounger. In the 1940s and '50s, the Eames brothers' shell chairs were the rage. Now, "the most common chair on the planet" is the "furniture equivalent of rubber flip-flops." It's the plastic, monobloc chair, which has literally littered our planet. Rybczynski is totally engaging in this smoothly flowing, sharp, witty narrative--another winner from a top-notch writer on design.

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Starred review from July 1, 2016
A common, quotidian object, the chair becomes anything but everyday in Rybczynski's discerning history. Both furniture and a vessel of personal and period tastes, it has a traceable lineage from ancient times to the present, and its many forms, evolved or designed, represent varied solutions to a rather unsolvable problem, as an industrial architect puts it. Namely, providing comfort in the sitting position, a subtle ergonomic challenge considering the range of people's physiology, the variety of their sitting postures, and their movement while sitting. Some forms that have become classics, such as the rocker, succeed by furnishing the chair's essential service as well as asserting aesthetically pleasing visual and tactile values. Populating his text with drawings and descriptions of chairs that meet these criteria, Rybczynski (Mysteries of the Mall and Other Essays, 2015) covers the materials and structure of their construction, phasing the latter theme from individual craftsmanship (declaring its apex to have been eighteenth-century French chair making) to industrial-scale manufacturing. In addition to the material aspect of chairs, Rybczynski highlights the attraction of the chair to modernist designers whose eye-catching creations, alas, rarely deliver comfort. A worthy addition to Rybczynski's well-regarded oeuvre, this cultured examination should be read in one's favorite reading chair, be it a Windsor or today's ubiquitous molded plastic seat.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)