Contenders to the Throne
Ever since the dawn of the office, chairs have come in two basic flavors: work chairs and thrones. Or as they’re known today, task seating and executive chairs. And never the twain shall meet. At least, not until the rules changed in 1994.
Eight years ago, the office chair hierarchy was stood on its head by the introduction of Herman Miller’s seminal Aeron chair, which set new standards for ergonomic efficiency while emerging as an I’m-so-cool icon for high-powered, high-styling dot-com executives. Not only was the Aeron chair named to the Museum of Modern Art’s design collection before it went on sale, but even more implausibly, it also entered the larger public consciousness. And by merging the utility of task seating with the status of a throne, it forever changed the landscape of the modern office.
“It was a controversial design,” says Don Chadwick, who co-designed the chair with Bill Stumpf. “We had developed a comprehensive rationale for selling it. But people didn’t care. They just said, ‘Give me the chair!’ ” Chadwick ruefully shakes his head as he lounges in a sleek black Aeron chair in his studio in Santa Monica. “You could understand it appealing to the A&D; community--architects and designers. But the public glommed onto it as well. It grew into something with a life of its own.”
The elevation of a mere office chair to an object of desire highlights the radical change the workplace has undergone during the past generation. Corporate environments have become more egalitarian and informal. Home offices are no longer curiosities. There’s a computer on every desktop. Thanks largely to the ubiquitous PC, the oversized executive throne with its tufted leather upholstery and self-important tilt-swivel now seems as passe as the mahogany credenza and the three-martini lunch. Instead, the contemporary seat of power is a new breed of chair that stands at a unique crossroads of style and performance, comfort and cachet.
The modern office, as we know it, moved into the 20th century in 1914, when the Metal Office Furniture Co. patented the steel wastebasket. In 1915, building upon the success of this newfangled product, the company sold its first metal desks. During the next half-century, the Metal Office Furniture Co.--now called Steelcase--would become the top dog of the contract furniture industry, and offices would be dominated by gleaming metal-topped desks that whispered Corporate America just as insistently as the clatter of manual typewriters and the rustle of gray-flannel suits. Radical change arrived in 1968, with the debut of Robert Propst’s Action Office--a Herman Miller furniture “system” that spawned the development of the open-plan, modular office that’s still with us today. Nevertheless, office seating continued to languish in the Dark Ages. With few exceptions, chairs were marketed on the basis of status, with secretaries getting the smallest ones and bosses the biggest, beefiest, most ostentatious executive units. (“My, that’s a big one!”) Comfort wasn’t a primary design objective. In fact, the very notion of a comfortable office chair seemed to be incompatible with efficiency nostrums and the Puritan work ethic.
Ergonomic seating didn’t reach the workplace until 1976, when Herman Miller introduced the appropriately named Ergon chair, designed by Stumpf.As the Information Age created a new class of knowledge workers, ergonomic office chairs--once the property solely of the clerical masses--percolated up into middle management. But the Aeron was the first chair to successfully integrate ergonomic performance with aesthetic drama--a design triumph that has made it as highly prized in executive suites and corporate boardrooms as it is in word-processing pools and home offices. It’s no coincidence that the marketplace is now awash in Aeron knockoffs, Aeron wannabes and would-be Aeron-slayers that blur the line between working-class seating and chairs fit for a king.
Already, a few motifs have become so commonplace that they risk becoming design cliches: Mesh fabrics. Sculpted surfaces. Exposed skeletons. But if there’s one feature shared by the new chairs, it’s the determination to out-Aeron the Aeron, so to speak. It won’t be easy. The Aeron chair was a textbook example of the right product in the right place at the right time. “Silicon Graphics bought a bunch right after it came out, and Silicon Valley spread the gospel,” Chadwick recalls.
The Aeron spoke with special resonance to the style czars of the New Economy. It bristled with original thinking, from a novel tilt mechanism to its mesh-like Pellicle fabric. But best of all, the Aeron oozed attitude: It was smart and hip and about as far as you could get from the bigger-is-better, leather-is-best executive chair of yore. So the Aeron emerged as an unlikely symbol of the New Economy. And when the dot-com boom went bust, the image that best summed up how the mighty had fallen was the fire sale of Aeron chairs on the sidewalks outside bankrupt tech companies.
The blockbuster success of the Aeron chair was so unexpected--even to MillerSTET--that it took the contract furniture industry years to respond. It wasn’t until 1999 that the Steelcase empire finally struck back with the Leap chair. The product of nearly four years and tens of millions of dollars in development, the Leap looks conservative next to the Aeron. “It’s contemporary without being outrageous, so it won’t ever look dated,” says Jan Carlson, general manager for seating, slyly dissing the Aeron chair for its iconic quality. The Leap chair’s big talking point is ergonomics, most notably a seat-back that conforms to the occupant’s “spineprint” and a unique tilt unit that glides forward when it reclines. “We wanted to redefine high-performance office seating,” she says.
Renewed interest in the high-end segment of the high-performance market gave ergonomics pioneer Niels Diffrient another bite at the apple. Diffrient designed his Freedom chair to capitalize on a signal truth he’d learned during the two decades since creating the groundbreaking Diffrient Operational in 1980. “Controls on chairs stymie people,” he says, “so I eliminated them. I wanted the chair to react automatically to any body, any size, any weight.”
Besides inaugurating what’s now called passive ergonomics, Diffrient also fashioned a fresh, though somewhat forbidding, design vocabulary that celebrates the function of the Freedom chair by exposing its structure--its skeleton--as a design element. Call it task seating as dentist’s chair. Celebrated designer/architect Mario Bellini put a sleekly Italian spin on this motif for Vitra with his Ypsilon chair, which draws its name from the attenuated Y-shaped spine of the sail-like seat-back. The chair looks like something out of a set designer’s vision for the next “Matrix” clone. Katherine Bennett, who teaches product design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, succinctly describes the idiom as “prehistoric futurism.”
There’s no question that the industrial overtones of the Aeron and its successors help explain their appeal to techies. Still, designer Mark Kapka was bored by the look. In shaping his aptly named Simple chair for Keilhauer, Kapka explored an alternative aesthetic for stripped-down seating designed for conference rooms. “Since we didn’t have all the ergonomic requirements [of task seating], we could quiet down the design language and make the chair more human,” he says. The Simple chair’s signature feature is a seat-back with mesh stretched across the frame to create a striking goblet-shaped silhouette.
In developing its own Aeron-fighter, dubbed the Life chair, Knoll also rejected the austere tech look in favor of something friendlier and more organic. The intuitive controls are slick. But what sets the Life apart is a seat-back exuding the willowy grace of Japanese calligraphy. Better still, it can be covered with 16 translucent fabrics that give the chair an ethereal quality.
While Life won the best task chair award at the NeoCon trade show in June, the other newcomer generating some serious buzz was Allsteel’s #19, whose name derives from the fact that the chair has 18 major components--plus the human being who’s using it. Visually, it’s characterized by aluminum tubing that produces a potent Machine Age look. Mechanically, the chair synthesizes features found in several rivals (passive ergonomics, an exoskeleton) with ones unique to #19 (a temperature-sensitive foam seat, a tilt mechanism that causes the seat to rise slightly when the chair reclines). “We started the design process by recognizing that a lot of companies were coming out with Aeron-like chairs,” says designer Marcus Koepke, “and we wanted to leapfrog the competition.”
Yet despite all the competition, the Aeron is still first among equals. Not because it’s necessarily the best or best-selling, but because it was the first to articulate the conviction that comfort and cachet needn’t be mutually exclusive. The revolution wrought by the Aeron chair hasn’t eradicated the traditional throne--a chair that performs no function other than conferring status upon its occupant--any more than the rise of feminism has eradicated the trophy wife. But it’s largely because of the Aeron’s example that more and more people are starting with high-performance chairs and dressing them up to fit their elevated stations in life. Thus, the Leap chair can be covered in Coach edition leather, and the Freedom chair is sold in both high-back executive form and as mid-back task seating. Because let’s face it: Status is all well and good --but not when your back is killing you.
