There is no one perfect chair - there are any number of perfect chairs. Whether searching for seating for the kitchen, living room, garden or office, the choice is not only multi-faceted. But endless. Among the "filters" one can use to narrow, and focus the choice are considerations such as if the required chair should be classic, practical or comfortable - or would a more versatile design not be more appropriate? Versatile. No problem! Renowned manufacturers such as Vitra, Thonet or Fritz Hansen offer distinctive, timeless designs for indoor and outdoor use, including collections of chairs suitable for any purpose and function, collections which thanks to the wide range of colours and materials mean that they can be used effortlessly in any space.
Victoria Ghost from Kartell
Any time, any place, any where. Most manufacturers of multi-purpose chairs offer them with or without armrests and with a wide range of bases and frames including steel tube and various woods. In particular the Eames Chairs impress through their diversity and flexibility. And once the choice has been made for a particular multi-purpose chair, it need not be forever: Why not swap dining and home-office chairs and thus enjoy a new atmosphere and new seating experiences?
Vitra Eames DSW Chair
Those who like fancy, tend towards the Victoria Ghost or the Louis Ghost from Kartell. Those who prefer it timeless, choose the Ant, the Oxford swivel chair or the Grand Prix from Danish manufacturer Fritz Hansen. In addition one can choose from genuine design classics such as the Vitra Eames DSW Side Chair or the Thonet cantilever S 43 Classic. The decision making process is however just as much one of materiality as it is one of aesthetics; among the myriad materials available for contemporary multi-purpose chairs one finds natural materials such as cane or wood, metal in numerous finishes and forms and synthetics, be that plastic mesh or polypropylene as used, for example, to shape the curved seat shell of the HAY About a Chair AAC 22. The SE 68 chair from Wilde+ Spieth is made of real wood veneer and functions equally well as a dinning chair or as an office chair.
Thonet cantilever S 43
With furniture, as with so much in life, it is rarely the showy, high profile, works, or individuals, that teach us most, but those works, and those individuals, who in their anonymity and modesty accompany us in invisible silence. Or rather the anonymous and...
...Originating in context of, and presented parallel to, the exhibition Chairs: Dieckmann!... de/burg-galerie/ Chairs: Dieckmann!...
..."1 With the exhibition Chairs: Dieckmann!... 2 And indeed unlike Junge Dieckmann was a member of the NSDAP; and as Aya Soika convincingly discusses in the Chairs: Dieckmann!...
...With the exhibition Chairs... Chairs...
...For our part we were particularly perturbed by the claim in the section on Plastic Chairs that the high sales figures for Gerd Lange's early 1970s Flex 2000 indicate that "Thonet had its finger on the pulse of the plastic age" If there's one thing the Thonet (hi)story teaches us it is that "plastic age" (largely) passed them by, that having established the company on two material/technological innovations they missed a third, lest we forget, which we can't because they are two examples in the exhibition, in the 1950s & 60s Thonet cooperated with Verner Panton on wooden chairs, you do the math... A state of affairs Bentwood and Beyond with its inter-twinned specific and general discussions on 200 years of modern furniture design very convincingly, satisfyingly, underscores and reinforces; despite moments such as Plastic Chairs or Super Normal Bentwood and Beyond isn't a hagiographic celebration of Thonet, but a series of reflections on Thonet in context of wider realities, a series of reflections on the (hi)story of furniture design and the path to our contemporary furniture understandings through the conduit of Thonet, and for all an exhibition which tends to underscore and reinforce the truism that continually evolving social, cultural, economic, technical, et al realities not only carries design forth but defines, and continually redefines, our relationships to our objects of daily use, demanding the new, discarding the obsolete, the foolish, the faddish while preserving, nurturing, certain universal archetypes as it rolls onwards...
