The chair is mans most diversely styled furntire item, with only one basic proviso: that it gives someone a place to sit usually on ones derriere. If you lie its a bed, if you can share it, its a sofa or couch, if you can slump sideways its a chaise longue, if it has no back its a stool. Ergonomic chairs give the sitter an opportunity to sit on the lower shins as well as the bottom. What is amazing about the chair is that it is a more or less completely modern invention. Before 18th Century in the west, people did sit, but they sat on benches, mats, cushions, stools, logs, chests or the floor. The earliest chairs were only for high-status people, tribal leaders, the religious elite and of course royalty on elaborate, rarely-used chairs called thrones. Today the leader of a group undertaking a discussion of some formality is called the chair. In the orient, notably the cultures of China and Japan the chair is distincly foreign construct, more or less unknown before the 20th Century.

In the new field of modern design, the simple seat has a totemic status. The history of 20th-century design can be charted by looking at the development of the chair. With the rise of new materials, the advances in engineering and mass production techniques and consciousness of ergonomics, the chair as artefact has been highly amenable to changing aesthetics: from austere to flamboyant, whimsical to functional, with many of the modern eras greatest design brains choosing to test their mettle in creating the ultimate, iconic chair.

Some of the great names who have tried, and tried successfully to design a chair that really moved things forward, and became an icon:

Marcel Breuer - The Wassily chair.
Made of leather and tubular steel, this unmistakable chair was an instant classic when it appeared, years before its time in the mid 1920s. Still manufactured. Breuer was one of the most prolific members of the Bauhaus the art and design school, later movement of Weimar, and a protg of its director Walter Gropius. After an unsatisfying stint working in Paris, Breuer went back to the Bauhaus, where one of his first projects was the 1926 steel club armchair (later renamed the Wassily, after the Bauhaus teacher Wassily Kandinsky) made from extruded nickel-plated tubular steel. Unusually light and easy to assemble from ready-made steel tubes, the chair was the result of Breuer's years of experiments with bending steel. It was immediately recognised as an important breakthrough in furniture design.

Olivier Mourgue - the Djinn Chair Used in the film 2001 A Space Odyssey, in the oribiting hotel Olivier Morgue:. The chairs (in the orbiting Hilton Hotel) were designed independently of the movie by French designer Olivier Mourgue. They were produced beginning in 1965, and called the "Djinn". There was a chair (with and without arms), a two seater sofa, a chaise-lounge, and a stool. I don't know if they are still in production. The series was made by the French company Airborne International.

Francois Lefranc - Indulgence Chair - lounge chair (2001)Compressed polyurethane foam. Lefranc is a designer-maker who is also a successful architect with a global reach, including France, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and the Dominican Republic. This lounge chair, made of attractive candy-stripes went into mass production for the supply of seating for the Las Vegas convention centre.

Substitute Worlds