Architects have been asked to nominate their favourite chairs for an exhibition entitled ‘SIT: 20 chairs, 20 architects’, which opens in a Dublin studio this evening
CHAIRS ARE functional, yet they have always been so much more than that. People buy them as much for their aesthetic beauty as their sit-fit, and designers have always endeavoured to make these small necessities into objects of art.
When architects design them, chairs can sometimes become a microcosm of their buildings, as in the Rietveld Red/Blue Chair, which is a scaled impression of Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld’s buildings, comprising primary coloured panels and various intersecting elements that shoot past each other.
People warm to chairs – not only do our bodies wear into wooden chairs of old, but they are the pieces of furniture that are most like humans, with their legs, seats, backs and arms. As Gary Lysaght of Dublin-based FKL Architects says of his favourite chair, Low Pad by Jasper Morrison: “It has the imprint of the human form: wide at the hips, narrowing to shoulders and square at the head.”
Simon O’Driscoll, who runs O’Driscoll Furniture in Dublin, with his brother Tadgh, has collected chairs for decades and the pair have designed them for architects over the years, including one called the Zoon Chair.
Then Simon decided to ask architects about their own favourites and the result is an exhibition called SIT: 20 chairs, 20 architects, which opens in their studio this evening (in a building shared with the Green on Red art gallery run by their brother Jerome).
“We wanted to get architects’ perspectives on what they consider to be good design,” says Simon.
The architects, who range from well-established practices to younger designers – from Henry J Lyons and McCullough Mulvin to Ryan W Kennihan Architects – have come up with a varied, but solid, range of chairs which illustrate just how versatile this mini art form is.
All of the chairs are classics: from the chunky, time- and human-worn timber vernacular Irish chair that Valerie Mulvin chose and the blue fold-up chair that John Tuomey of O’Donnell and Tuomey was given by the owner of a taverna in Greece, to the late 19th-century bentwood Thonet chair chosen by Merritt Bucholz of Bucholz McEvoy Architects, who says: “I like the fact it is light, hard wearing and comfortable without being ‘ergonomic’.” It is, he says: “The chair that I find to be most like a bicycle – it keeps up with life’s pace.”
Also in the exhibition are the bent plywood chairs that represented a breakthrough in technology when they were made by US design-duo Charles and Ray Eames; these have been chosen by Michael Tallon of Scott Tallon Walker.
Modern classics include the cocooning Egg Chair by Arne Jacobsen, picked by Felim Dunne of BCDH Architects, and the witty, playful Red/Blue Chair by Rietveld, a favourite of Grafton Architects’ Yvonne Farrell, who says, “It’s lovely to look at. It’s fun. It looks like it might not be comfortable but it is”, and the tractor seat designed by the Castiglionis, picked by Finghin Curraoin Henry J Lyons, who has “memories as a child of sitting on similar seats on tractors in Kilkenny where I grew up”.
“Integrity of design and quality” is what Simon O’Driscoll is after in a chair, something that naturally leads to sustainability, and the chairs in the exhibition all have this.
Ryan Kennihan chose an antique chair and he quotes architect Adolf Loos: “We do not sit in a particular way because a cabinetmaker has made a chair in this way or that way, the cabinetmaker makes the chair in a particular way because that is the way we want to sit.”
Yet people are prepared to be forgiving of chairs they love, such as architect Emmett Scanlon of Cast Architecture who chose Arne Jacobsen’s Ant Chair, which is in his office. “It’s a sensual, elegant and beautiful object and I didn’t consider if it was comfortable. It is not stable. We warn people before they sit down, in case they topple off, but I still sit on this chair and its beautiful imbalance encourages me each day to strive to find some better architectural poise.”
Some old chairs, meanwhile, seems to grow into the human form. Valerie Mulvin found her favourite chair in a ruined cottage in Ringaskiddy and fell for “its simplicity of form and materials – a shape reduced to its absolute essentials – and its patina of age: the concept of wabi-sabi in Japanese: the beauty of imperfection and austerity, a quality of beauty that comes with ageing.”
SIT: 20 chairs, 20 architects runs from today until May 19th at O'Driscoll Furniture, 26-28 Lombard Street East, Dublin 2, oddesign.com
