11 iconic chairs from our archive and what you need to know about them

From the wishbone to the chaise longue, take a seat and enjoy the most iconic chairs from our archives
 

Achair tells a story of time, place and style better than any other piece of furniture. A chair from a particular era and location can tell a thousand stories, from cultural behaviour to material usage and hierarchies. Believed to have been invented in the Early Dynastic Period of Egypt around 5800 years ago, the average person spends about 18 years of their life sitting on a chair. It’s no wonder, then, that some of the greatest designers the world over have dedicated much of their careers to chair design.

Some of the most famous chair designers in the west emerged in the 20th century, with design giants like Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Hans J. Wegner contributing vastly to our perception of chairs as significant design artefacts. From elegantly carved Medieval thrones, to elegantly dressed armchairs and mid-century modern classics, chairs are a great way to look at history. We take a look at some of the most iconic chairs from our archives, so take a seat and enjoy.

Iconic chairs

Knoll Cesca dining chairs
The tubular steel-framed ‘Cesca’ dining chair – seen here in Zoë Zimmer’s flat – was designed by Marcel Breuer in 1928. The Cesca chair is so iconic that it features in MoMA’s permanent collection. The fact that it is cantilevered makes the Knoll chair appear to float with no back legs, a design which was only possible through the invention of and developments in tubular steel. Breuer was inspired by bicycle design and the way plumbers constructed things for the chair, and as a department head at the Bauhaus, he was interested in creating the most rational designs possible for furniture and buildings.

Hans Wegner Wishbone chair
Hans Wegner’s Wishbone chair is as iconic as they come and they are a classic around tables all over the country – as seen here in a dining room by Anna Haines. The design was apparently inspired by a painting of Ming dynasty chairs from 1944, but the name refers to the Y-shaped bone found in a chicken. The seat is made of twisted papercord, which is somehow both rustic but surprisingly strong and a very Scandinavian design feature.

Wishbone chairs are part of the early wave of the mid-century Danish design tradition which was really about wood, about natural materials, about feeling soft and natural and also functional. So if Breuer and Le Corbusier are all about ‘machines for Living’ – think Bauhaus and tubular steel – the Scandinavians who came a bit later (in the 1940s mainly) are really about a more humanistic approach but still rational.

Trieste Chairs by Aldo Jacober
The chairs are the central design focus in Schumacher’s European CEO Benni Frowein flat in a Victorian house. Benni commissioned the architecture and design practice Atelier Pendhapa to make the raku ceramic-topped dining table, around which are some of Aldo Jacober’s 1970s folding Trieste chairs.

This dining table of a house in Bruges features many chairs but one of the most iconic chairs is the Ant Chair (seen here in a fun shade of bright red) designed in 1951 by Arne Jacobsen. It’s well-loved for being light and stackable, as well as ergonomically curved backs for comfort. It must be noted though that the very similar Series 7 chair by Arne Jacobsen is more famous – and much much more ‘sold’, it often gets cited as the most produced chair in design history. It has long been a real icon of attractive, intentional ‘mass’ production.

As for the Ant chair, it takes Breuer’s earlier experimentations in tubular steel and further simplifies it by using bent plywood (the materials – and how they can be used to reduce designs down to their bare bones are so important in these designs), so you end up with just a two-material, three-part design (i.e. one piece of plywood; two lengths of bent steel crossed over), creating a very minimal design. The shapely form of the tiny waist pre-empts a more fun pop aesthetic of the later mid century (which designers like Panton and then Phillipe Starck will pick up and run with!)

The Eames Lounge chair and ottoman
One of the most iconic chairs in modern history: the lounge chair and ottoman by Charles and Ray Eames, seen here in this unusual Georgian house designed by Salvesen Graham. The chair and footstool were designed in 1956 for the luxury market. They are known for their cool, clean design and luxurious back support. They were produced by Vitra from pretty much day one of their existence and continue to do so, fetching a price that has remained steady in the market for coming on 70 years.

The Eames chair is made of a bent plywood structure and masses of padded leather and was inspired by English ‘clubby’ furniture like the tub chair and the Chesterfield sofa, but they wanted to translate that high end and comfortable aesthetic into a modernist set of principles. Fun fact: Eames was allso inspired by the feeling of being inside a baseball glove!

Charlotte Perriand dining chairs
This table and chairs were designed Charlotte Perriand, an icon of 20th-century design. Perriand was a protegée of and designer alongside Le Corbusier and, until fairly recently, almost everything she designed was attributed to him. He was, according to some sources, something of a domineering and controversial figure. Later, Charlotte has become credited as a co-designer on many of the iconic designs we used to solely credit to Le Corbusier. The chairs are made from ash with a woven seat.

Chandigarh chair by Pierre Jeanneret
The Chandigarh chair was designed by Pierre Jeanneret in the 1940s. After Indian Independence, the first Prime Minister Nehru wanted to create a modern, global city as a capital of Punjab (Chandigarh). He commissioned Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret to create basically the entire city, designing housing complexes, government buildings and hospitals, so this range of furniture was essentially a sort of ‘municipal chair’. As such, it was designed to be as rational in its design as possible – simple blocky forms that could be easily assembled by anyone on a production line, abundant local materials in the form of teak and rattan. It is therefore quite amusing that the chair has become so indicative of luxury living these days.

Thonet Bentwood chair
Also known as the Vienna café chair, these iconic models came in the 19th century with the invention of steam bending. In a way, they serve as a proto-modernist design, for the tubular steel and beny plywood models which came later and are a sturdier version of this early experimentation with steam-bent wood. They may be slightly flimsy compared to the steel that followed, but they still had a lightness of form which would have been eye-catching at the time. The advent of steam bending enabled designers to create curls and flourishes that Victorian ‘modernists’ loved and today, Thonet Bentwood chairs are still considered modern and elegant.

Knoll Harry Bertoia chair
The Knoll Harry Bertoia chair is quite unlike anything else. It was designed by Harry Bertoia in the 1950 using a very industrial material called wise mesh, but sculpted in an elegant way to create something entirely unique.

Philippe Starck Ghost chair
Philippe Starck’s Ghost chair is an early example of using injection moulding plastic. This invention allows designers to be experimental, sexy and minima, because the form and the material can be completely disconnected from each other. The Ghost chair is all about Postmodernism and showed a way of thinking that’s opposite to how Breuer and co were doing things. Starck took French classical silhouettes and shapes and minimised them down into one single, moulded plastic form, creating an icon in the process.

Marcel Breur Wassily chair
Breuer was head of the cabinet-making department at the Bauhaus when he designed this chair. It features the same tubular steel design as his Cesca chair, but this time, what is noteworthy is that the incredibly strong fabric is a product of the weaving department at the Bauhaus at the time, which was the only department that women could enrol in, due to prejudices of the time. Gunta Schoztl and Anni Albers were prominent members of the department.