The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design - Hardcover

Cranz, Galen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393046559 ISBN 13: 9780393046557

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1998

Synopsis

Describes how the development of chairs has had more to do with status than comfort or practicality, and argues for the use of a wider variety of postures and more body-conscious seating

About this title

About the Author

Galen Cranz, Ph.D. is professor of architecture at the University of California at Berkeley.

Reviews

The oldest surviving chair comes from the tomb of King Tut. "Roman chairs were rare, decorative items of luxury." Chairs themselves represent the West—or the "barbarians"—to cultures that have done without them. Office seating uses shape, fabric and size to make clear which chair belongs to the boss. And current home seating—even the "male" La-Z-Boy—increasingly tries to accommodate women's bodies and tastes. So reports Cranz (The Politics of Park Design), a professor of architecture at the U.C.-Berkeley, in this concise, multidisciplinary gem. Cranz begins by surveying the chair's historical kinds, styles and meanings; then addresses issues of back support, body shape and ergonomics; and ends up in a vigorous, detailed argument against the standard right-angled chair and "chair-desk complex," in favor of "body-conscious design" in an attractively described Ideal Workplace. "Sitting is hard work," Cranz's research reveals; seatmakers should, she says, abandon the common principle of lower-back support; the Alexander Technique of somatic therapy holds lessons for furniture designers; "human beings are not designed to hold any single posture for long periods"; garden-variety office furniture is bad for you; and the famous chairs of Modernism are, in general, even worse. Cranz's clear book—half survey, half polemic—may successively delight, instruct and alarm professors in their endowed chairs, designers at their slanted tables, drivers in drivers' seats, parents with carseats and, of course, the armchair intellectual. 85 photographs and illustrations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Berkeley architecture professor Cranz takes a radical departure from her first book, The Politics of Park Design, in offering up a soundly intellectual perspective on the chair--its history, styles, uses, and evolution. Far from being an object of desire, the four-legged wonder as commonly designed and perceived wreaks havoc on our bodies, making the phrase "comfortable chair" a thoroughly modern oxymoron. In fact, Cranz examines in depth most of our sitting apparatuses--from Breuer's Cresca chair to Norway's Balans--and finds most wanting. Her solution? A five-point checklist, a new philosophical perspective (somatics, the science of body-mind relationships), and a range of novel ways to align and support torsos properly. Provocative yet thoughtful, with more than a kernel of truth. Barbara Jacobs

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393046559
• ISBN 13: 9780393046557
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288