Take a Seat

The chair is no longer a symbol of power, though it still fascinates designers

A version of Gerrit Rietveld’s famous Red and Blue Chair, originally designed in 1917.

This week I was lucky enough to attend a symposium at the Royal College of Art, on a subject that is close to my heart – and even closer to my rear: the chair. This is one of those objects that is both extremely ordinary (are you sitting on one now?) and freighted with all kinds of social significance. Natalie Dubois of Utrecht’s Centraal Museum, a speaker at the symposium, pointed to the longstanding link between chairs and power, encoded in language. Can you secure a seat at the table? Or will you be dethroned? Who will win the most parliamentary seats? Better ask the chairman. On the other hand, these can be very intimate objects. Few images represent absence as viscerally as an empty chair.

Designers, like monarchs and emperors, have long shown a peculiar interest in chairs. Normally prestige flows towards things that are very large (buildings and monuments) or very expensive (precious materials and intricate workmanship). But to judge by the results, neither of these criteria can explain why so many prominent architects have tried to stamp their genius on the chair, from Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Gerrit Rietveld to Mies van der Rohe and the Smithsons. Perhaps the reason is that, as the RCA’s Alon Meron suggested, a chair is not just an object but a space – an engineered structure and a sculptural negative of the human body. As such, the chair lends itself to the concentrated expression of architectural style.

To show the on-going association of chairs with power, Dubois recalled the infamous snub of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, by Turkish premier Recep Erdoğan in 2021. At a diplomatic event in Ankara, a chair was provided for Erdoğan and for Charles Michel, another EU politician, but not for von der Leyen, who was left standing awkwardly at the side. She reluctantly sat down on a couch opposite the Turkish foreign minister, an arrangement seemingly intended to humiliate. In truth though, there are few situations today when chairs possess such gravity. The old codes dictating who can sit and who must stand belong to a traditional understanding of authority and deference, one that offends the modern mind. What remains is largely a matter of body language. There are moments when sitting down uninvited feels inappropriately relaxed, like swearing or lighting a cigarette.

Early twentieth-century studies in scientific management investigated the most efficient way of seating a worker. (Image: from Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire)

If sitting no longer conveys the authority it once did, it might also be because most of us do it all day. Modernity has been, among other things, a revolution in posture, as a growing portion of the population completes the journey from the fields via the factory into a chair. The symbol for bureaucratic labour has always been the desk – that is, the bureau – but these objects are symbiotically connected (you generally don’t stand at a desk). Today the chair is part of a functional apparatus that includes the table, the laptop, the human body and the coffee cup. That may sound facetious, but in the early twentieth century, when people were still needed for tasks like copying, filing and computing, significant attention was paid to the most efficient way of seating a worker. From the perspective of “scientific management,” a typist and her chair were part of a single productive mechanism. The same is true for me, except that I’m free to sit in an uncomfortable chair if I wish.

The point is that, in a sedentary world, a chair is as likely to represent confinement, boredom and inertia as power or status. We go to great lengths to ensure we escape our chairs at least occasionally, lest we develop back problems or depression. An “active lifestyle,” once an obligation for the vast majority, is the real luxury now. Then again, when I’ve finished this sentence I will probably just move to the sofa.