As soon as I found out trendy art publisher Taschen had produced a book called 1000 Chairs, I knew I had to have it. My Vitra chair poster, after all, only features 224 chairs. For a modern design aficionado like me, with an insatiable appetite for chairs, that isn't enough chairs. So until they publish 10,000 Chairs, this 3-inch thick picturebook will be my chair bible.

Chairs from 1808 to 1997 are featured, from Samuel Gragg's bent ash and hickory design (Gragg received the first patents for bent wood) to Ross Lovegrove's cantilevered polyurethane seat on a tubular aluminum frame. Never heard of them? Don't worry; there's plenty of Guimard, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Gustav Stickley, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Eames, Saarinen, Noguchi, Gehry, and Philippe Starck.

What strikes you most, paging through this book, is how small and unvaried the universe of chairs is for most of us. The range of design options middle America has been exposed to is so restricted. Think of the chairs that have become part of the American vernacular: the aluminum folding chair, the Barcalounger, the office swivel chair, the generic upholstered institutional chair such as can be found in doctors' waiting rooms. It's analogous to living in a world where we only have contact with cats, dogs, and horses, never realizing that there are tens of thousands of other species out there.

This distinction between mainstream and avant-garde chairs is addressed in the brief introduction. The avant-garde makes up only a small fraction of furniture produced, yet has an inordinate influence over mainstream designs. Mainstream chairs are rarely innovative except in bringing cost down.

Each chair's photograph is accompanied by a small chunk of text in English, German and French. This is a little annoying because it means that each chair is only allocated about two explanatory sentences, but on the other hand it's a great opportunity to brush up on your German and French furniture vocabulary. Unfortunately, the blurbs are rarely enlightening. Eero Saarinen's well known Womb Chair Model No. 70, for example, is summarized thusly: "The No. 70 incorporated a moulded fibreglass seat shell. With its generous proportions and organic form, it invited the user to curl up in it. Because of this it eventually became known as the "womb" chair." You don't say.

Fortunately porn only needs to satisfy us with images. Our imagination and arousal supplant any need for text or dialogue.

Those of you immune to the seductiveness of modern chairdom are excused. What follows is purely hardcore.

I've divided the chairs into four categories:

The Classic / Seminal: Chairs that have become iconographic, mass produced and duplicated so often we forget that they were once revolutionary. If you've read this far I don't need to tell you what chairs belong here.

The Ridiculous: Any lower on the functionality meter and these chairs would be unusable.

p. 292 -- Bruno Munari's Chair Singer, No. 5000. Very traditional cherry frame with wood inlays, but its sheet metal seat is set at such a steep angle that it's impossible to sit on.

p. 370-371 -- The Castiglioni brothers' 1957 stools made of tractor and bicycle seats, and the 1966 Moon Landing Chair.

p. 480 -- Matta's 1970 Magritte-inspired chair has a circular frame, filled completely by a big green apple.

p. 495 -- Gruppo Strum's 1966 "Pratone" -- a chunk of closely grouped green polyurethane foam stalagmites, a design that "invites different modes of interaction."

p. 563 -- Stiletto's 1983 "Consumer's Rest," a bent and slightly reshaped grocery cart.

p. 653 -- Hironen's 1993 Unichair looks like a foam stegosaurus, with a spherical ottoman.

p. 666 -- The Airos 1993, has a seat made of a transparent gymnastic ball.

The Hideous: If only we could wipe these chairs from memory.

p. 307 -- The Trundling Turk, 1954.

p. 527 -- Wendell Castle's 1978 Chair with Sports Coat, carved from solid maple. What's the point?

Chairs from the Memphis School, such as those by Alessandro Mendini, Ettore Sottsass, Robert Venturi, Gaetano Pesce. Andre Dubreuil's 1988 Paris Chair. Borik Sipek's 1992 Sedlak Chair.

The Sublime: I would sell your grandmother for one of these chairs.

p. 136 -- Gustav Stickley's 1905 Cube chair shows why squares are aesthetically perfect.

p. 158 -- Gropius' 1923 office armchair, ebonized wood with a cantilevered seat upholstered in purple suede.

p. 163 -- Marcel Breuer's 1925 chrome and leather Wassily chair, designed for Wassily Kandinsky's quarters at the Dessau Bauhaus, revolutionized both the aesthetics and methods of chair design. It's so modern looking you can hardly believe it's more than 75 years old.

p. 172 -- Mies van der Rohe's 1929 leather and chrome Barcelona chair. It looks particularly hideous in this photograph, but you'll still recognize it.

p. 191 -- Le Corbusier's 1928 Grand Confort Model No. LC2 and LC3, tubular steel frame with big, boxy leather cushions. Innovative in positioning the frame externally. Shows again why the cube is the perfect form.

p. 210 -- Gabriele Mucchi's 1935 Genni chair and ottoman, chromed tubular steel frame with black leather upholstery.

p. 213 -- Giuseppe Tarragni's Follia chair (1934), used in the Casa del Fascio, the Italian Fascist headquarters in Como. Completely boxy and rationalist, black painted wood with lovely curved stainless steel connectors, incredibly uncomfortable looking. If loving this chair makes me a Fascist, then count me in.

p. 342 -- Borge Mogensen's Spanish chair, 1959. Solid birch frame with leather seat and back, metal buckles. Robust, yet unfussy and modern.

p. 394 -- George Nelson's 1964 Sling Sofa, inspired by the Citroen's latex-supported car seat. This sofa would be in my living room if it didn't cost $6,000.


Note: page numbers here refer to the 2000, not the 1998 edition.






Recommended: Yes