Douro Chair
Roorkhee Chair
By the end of the nineteenth century, luxurious campaign furniture had been replaced by what we would call camp furniture. The Roorkhee Chair, named after the regimental headquarters of the Indian Army Corps of Engineers, was a mass-produced wood-and-canvas easy chair. The ten pieces of turned oak or mahogany, pegged in predrilled holes, were held together by two wing nuts and the laced canvas seat. Disassembled, the dowels and the canvas could be rolled into a compact bundle. The chair was not only quickly assembled and disassembled without tools, the frame was flexible enough to be stable no matter how uneven the ground.
The utilitarian Roorkhee Chair was used in Africa during the Boer War and later became popular with big-game hunters on safari. Its unknown inventor was likely a member of the Corps of Engineers—the ingenious design has an engineer’s sense of straightforward functionality. No wonder the chair influenced the early European modernists. Its leather-strap arms showed up in Breuer’s Wassily Chair, as well as in Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret, and Le Corbusier’s fauteuil à dossier basculant, a tubular steel armchair that also copied the Roorkhee Chair’s most comfortable feature, a pivoting back. In 1933, after seeing a photograph of the Roorkhee Chair, Kaare Klint modified the proportions, simplified the turnings, made the seat lower and slightly slanted, and produced his enduring Safari Chair. It includes a modification suggested by Klint’s friend Arne Jacobsen: a loose seat cushion. The first Safari Chair I saw was in the office of one of my professors, who had studied in Copenhagen. Soon after I graduated, I purchased one of my own, although all I could afford was a less-expensive imitation—a copy of a copy.
Knockdown furniture was convenient for peripatetic military officers, but in an age of international trade it had another advantage: a demountable chair was cheaper to ship. Many of Thonet’s chairs, both bentwood and tubular steel, were transported flat from the factory to his shops, where they were assembled before delivery to customers. In 1925, Theophilus Billington, who had owned a furniture store in Dallas, received a patent for “a simple and inexpensive table which may be manufactured and compactly shipped in knocked-down condition but quickly and easily set up by the merchant or other party receiving the shipment.” A couple of decades later, an Ohio furniture manufacturer, Erie J. Sauder, began making ready-to-assemble furniture for a mail-order company. But the major breakthrough in knockdown furniture occurred elsewhere. In 1951, a Swedish draftsman, Gillis Lundgren, had a eureka moment. He had bought a table, and being unable to fit it into his Volvo, he unscrewed the legs and reassembled them when he got home. Lundgren worked for a mail-order company that sold furniture. Why not design furniture that could be shipped flat and was assembled by the buyer, he reasoned. He mentioned his idea to his employer, Ingvar Kamprad, and a few years later the company produced its first piece of knockdown furniture. Needless to say, I am describing IKEA.
Anyone who has struggled to assemble an IKEA product will have mixed feelings about Lundgren’s discovery. Over the years I have put together a table and several IKEA bookshelves and cupboards, but never a chair. As a test, I bought the most basic wooden chair in the IKEA catalogue, a side chair called Ivar.3 The chair cost twenty-five dollars and came in a flat cardboard box only four inches thick. IKEA’s wooden furniture is made in one of forty-four plants located in eleven countries; my chair came from China. There were seven pieces: two side frames, two slats, two rails, and a seat, all unpainted wood. There was also a plastic bag of assorted hardware and an Allen wrench. I counted the ten screws and sixteen wooden pegs before starting because I remembered that IKEA doesn’t provide extras. I carefully read the instruction booklet, which resembled a comic strip without words. There were six steps, and it seemed clear enough except for step five, which included “Do” and “Don’t” diagrams that to me looked identical. Undeterred, I plunged ahead.
“IKEA is Legos for grownups, connecting the furniture of our adulthoods with the toys of our childhoods,” wrote Lauren Collins in The New Yorker. I’m not convinced by the analogy because I’ve never actually enjoyed assembling IKEA products, but it took only fifteen minutes to put Ivar together, which included going down to the basement when I realized that I needed a Phillips screwdriver. The result was a simple ladder-back chair with a flat wooden seat. It was not without small refinements: the back was slightly inclined, the slats were gently curved, the seat was subtly wedge-shaped, and the rear legs were splayed, giving the chair an attractive stance.
Ivar (IKEA)
I field-tested Ivar for a week as a dining chair. It was more comfortable than I expected, despite the flat seat. Or perhaps because of it? Galen Cranz, a Berkeley architecture professor who has written about the ergonomics of chairs, is a proponent of flat, uncontoured seats that allow more body movement than shaped seats. Sitting in the chair, I could feel the lower slat giving lumbar support and my upper back resting against the top rail. Not quite an Åkerblom curve, but close.
My wife kept asking me how long the IKEA chair was going to stay in the dining room. I had to admit that compared with our bentwood chairs Ivar was a clumsy fellow. You couldn’t really blame him—he was made of white pine. Plentiful and easily worked softwoods such as pine were traditionally used only by country carpenters; joiners and cabinetmakers used hardwoods. Comparing white pine with beech (which is what our bentwood chairs are made of), it is easy to understand why. The compressive and bending strengths of beech are twice that of pine; beech is also four times harder. This means that a beechwood chair can be more delicate than a pine chair—hence lighter—and it will be more resistant to wear and tear. Beech is also more stable than pine, less likely to warp, and more amenable to carving. Finally, the surface of oiled or varnished hardwoods is visually richer. The reason that IKEA uses pine in its least expensive chairs is simply price; pine is two to three times cheaper than beech. On the other hand, a softwood chair’s life expectancy is considerably shorter than that of a good hardwood chair, which can last for centuries. Poor old Ivar is unlikely to ever see the inside of a consignment shop.
Swing
Folding and knockdown chairs can be easily transported, but what about chairs that move in place? The first moving seats were not rockers, which we have already examined, but swings. The oldest representation of one that I came across was a clay figurine of a girl sitting on a swing suspended between two posts or trees. It was discovered in Hagia Triada, a late Minoan settlement dating from the middle of the second millennium B.C. Whether the figurine is a cult object or a toy is unclear, but the bench seat is immediately recognizable, as is the figure’s familiar posture, two raised arms grasping the ropes.
There is something pleasantly aimless about sitting on a swing, although it does require concentration—you can’t read, or eat, or doze off. Swinging is the closest thing to flying, the rush of air, the rhythmic movement, the ever-ascending arc. Swings, because they are so simple—a board and two ropes—appeared independently in many different cultures. Greek amphora paintings depict women on improvised swings—four-legged stools suspended from tree branches by ropes—a reference to the Dionysian Feast of the Swing. Pre-Columbian figurines depict children on swings, which is hardly surprising since the hammock was a Mayan invention. Old Chinese paintings show women standing on garden swings, and swing competitions were a feature of traditional village festivals in China and Korea. In Japan, the garden swing was probably a European import, for it was called buranko, the Japanese pronunciation of the Portuguese balanco.
Swings are popular on the Indian subcontinent, where they were introduced by the Mughals. Miniature Rajput paintings show women seated and standing on garden swings, singly and in pairs. Today, Indian swings, or jhoolas, come in a variety of sizes, as small as an infant’s cradle or as large as a king-size bed, and are used inside homes as well as in gardens. According to a Gujarati friend, a key pleasure of a jhoola is the cooling breeze as it swings.
Indian swings, like the swings of an
tiquity, are associated with women. In a contemporary Indian novel, Beyond Diamond Rings by Kusum Choppra, one of the female characters wonders about this. “Isn’t it curious that except for the trapeze artists, you never see men on swings? It is always women and girls who are on the swings, in the gardens, the public parks, the playgrounds, the private jhoolas at homes, everywhere, all the time, in art, in literature, in songs, in festivals, in the seasons, whatever.” She later concludes that it is the sense of freedom experienced on a swing that attracts women. “Up there, you are one with the clouds, the birds, and the air. Those velvet lined, gold chains around the ankles are left behind down there, somewhere, as you soar high on your imagination…”
There is something mildly erotic about a young woman lightheartedly swinging to and fro, hair and dress aswirl. Rococo painters certainly thought so, and young women on swings were a staple of artists such as Watteau. Eighteenth-century swings were not pushed but pulled—by a rope attached to the swing, usually handled by a young man. The back-and-forth movement of the swing—now tantalizingly close, now untouchably far—was a fitting painterly metaphor for the ritual of courtship. The great swing masterpiece was painted by François Boucher’s pupil Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Originally titled The Happy Accidents of the Swing, the painting portrays a pretty young woman on a swing in a garden. Her elderly guardian—or perhaps spouse—is sitting on a bench behind her, pulling on the rope. Unknown to him, a handsome young admirer is hidden in the rosebushes. As the woman reaches the high point of her swing, she kicks up her leg with gay abandon, sending one pink shoe flying in the voyeur’s direction, while he gazes rapturously up her billowing skirts.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who admired Fragonard, painted a woman on a swing, too. His version is almost the opposite of Fragonard’s suggestive scene. The setting is a public garden in Montmartre, suffused in dappled light. A young woman is standing motionless on a low swing, engaged in intimate conversation with a man who may be courting her; perhaps he has just proposed. If so, he is not doing well, for she has turned away, seemingly embarrassed. In French, a swing is a balançoire, and her somewhat precarious posture appears distinctly unbalanced, mirroring her indecision.
Had Renoir been American rather than French, and had he lived in a small town rather than a city, he might have set his painting on a porch and placed his model on a swing seat. Porch swings were—and are—an American fixture. They probably originated in the South, where the climate encouraged their use and “porch life” was a long-standing tradition. Like the jhoola, the southern swing was often couch-size. Like rococo swings, porch swings were associated with romance, specifically courtship. Swings were not used inside the house, but were sometimes used as beds on sleeping porches. Starting at the turn of the nineteenth century, New England sailmakers made swing beds called “couch hammocks,” which were deep, box-shaped settees made out of scrap canvas laced with rope. They were likewise used outside on porches, the high back and sides providing protection from the wind.
Lowcountry joggling board
Charleston, South Carolina, is a city closely associated with swings, because so many houses have verandas. That is where I first saw an unusual porch seat: the so-called joggling board. The seat resembles a very long bench—sometimes as long as sixteen feet—with a flexible plank, usually southern yellow pine, freely supported at each end, which allows the sitter to bounce up and down. Sometimes the supports are on rockers. The joggling board is supposed to have originated in the early 1800s on a Lowcountry plantation whose owner’s sister suffered from rheumatism; the springy bench enabled her to exercise in place. I was told that in the past, courting couples would sit at opposite ends of the board, and as the bench bounced, they would slide closer together until they met in the middle. Think of what Fragonard could have done with that.
Roll
The other evening my wife and I saw As You Like It performed by a local theater company. The play contains Shakespeare’s oft-quoted monologue “All the world’s a stage.” The Seven Ages of Man made me think of the Seven Ages of Chairs: baby carriage, high chair, schoolroom chair, office chair, club chair, recliner, wheelchair. Our lives begin and end in chairs on wheels.
I have a photograph of myself in a stroller on Crossland Crescent in Peebles, Scotland, in 1945. I am two years old, slouched, asleep. The stroller is rudimentary: four wheels attached to a tubular steel frame with a seat and a push bar. The seat must be metal or some other hard material, for it is covered with a blanket. This type of baby carriage was descended from the perambulator, or pram, a late-nineteenth-century Victorian invention that was essentially a bassinet on wheels. Prams were large, elaborate, and expensive—I doubt that my parents could have afforded one on a second lieutenant’s pay. A stroller, or pushchair, as the British called it, was a much cheaper alternative.
Owen Finlay Maclaren, a British aeronautical engineer, is the Thomas Edison of the stroller. During World War II, he was responsible for the design of the retractable undercarriage of the Spitfire fighter plane. After the war, Maclaren started a company that made aluminum aircraft parts, and also explored using the new lightweight material for consumer products. In 1961, he produced the Gadabout, a folding camp chair that is an updated—and simplified—descendant of the Fenby Chair. Four tubular aluminum X-frames support a fabric sling. This chair was the immediate precursor to his classic umbrella stroller. Maclaren had the idea when he saw his daughter, who was visiting from the United States with his first grandchild, struggling with a conventional baby carriage. He designed a collapsible pushchair that is basically the Gadabout on wheels. The tubular aluminum X-frames support a polyethylene fabric sling seat, and the whole thing, which weighs only six pounds, handily folds up into a compact bundle—like an umbrella. (Using a foot release lever, a person holding a baby can fold and unfold the stroller with one hand.) Maclaren’s chair is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, but unlike most designer chairs it is not an aesthetic object but a tool, as functional as a fighter-plane undercarriage.
Umbrella stroller (Owen Maclaren)
Maclaren’s stroller reminds me of an earlier child’s chair. In 1760, Louis XV charged the great ébéniste Jean-François Oeben with an unusual commission: a special wheelchair. It was for the king’s oldest grandson, the nine-year-old Duke of Burgundy, Louis-Joseph, who was unable to walk as the result of a recent accident—he fell off a hobby horse. Only this written description survives of Oeben’s creation:
Delivered by le Seigneur Oeben, cabinetmaker, for the use of M. le Duc de Bourgoyne at Versailles, a mechanical armchair with springs, 30 in. wide and 30 in. high, rotating on a pivot and rising to a height of 5½ ft., covered with crimson damask with cushions in two sections and a third for the back, all in crimson, the head rest in the same color of damask, there is a footrest covered in red-morocco leather under which is a frame of polished iron containing six brass wheels which engage into a worm-screw, at the foot are three brass castors for rolling the chair and turning it in any direction. Note: Three wheels, two large and one small, have been attached to the chair to enable it to be taken out into the park, and a kind of swan-neck supporting a wooden canopy to which to attach curtains, and there is a table in cherry-wood.
The little duke, who died before his tenth birthday, did not get much use from this magical contraption.
It is difficult to imagine a rotating chair that is also capable of rising to a height of five feet, but the reference to a “worm-screw” makes Oeben’s mechanical chair sound like the invalid’s chair invented a hundred years earlier by Nicolas Grollier de Servière, a military engineer. Grollier had a “cabinet of curiosities” in his Lyon residence where he displayed working models of his inventions—siege engines, hydraulic machines, surveying instruments, locks, clocks, and windmills. The count was the Leonardo of his day—so famous that no lesser than Louis XIV traveled to Lyon to see the collection. Among the displays was a self-propelled chair with two geared front wheels powered by worm gears
turned by hand cranks. By operating one or both of the cranks, the sitter could move the chair backward or forward, this way or that. The mechanical chair was included in a catalogue of Grollier’s works published by his grandson in 1719: “very useful for the lame and for those with gout, which can be used to move around a home on one level or in the garden, without anyone’s help.” Parisian joiners were soon building self-propelled fauteuils de malade, with padded armrests, loose seat cushions, and reclining backrests. Oeben, with his interest in mechanical devices, would undoubtedly have been familiar with such chairs.
Grollier’s mechanical chair was introduced to England by John Joseph Merlin, a Belgian-born mathematical-instrument maker and inventor. Merlin opened a private museum in London where he exhibited his inventions: lifelike automatons, ingenious music boxes, complicated timepieces, weigh scales, and mechanical toys. His self-propelled “Gouty Chair” was a direct copy of a fauteuil de malade, but Merlin subsequently made an original contribution to the evolution of the wheelchair. He substituted two large push wheels for the hand-cranked front wheels, producing an invalid’s chair that could be used out of doors. In addition, he is credited with adding external hoops to the push wheels so that sitters could avoid handling the dirty tires. Often fitted with reclining backs and footrests, “Merlin chairs” were widely used in Britain throughout the nineteenth century and were the forerunners of today’s wheelchairs.
Now I Sit Me Down Page 14
