I hate to be the guy who goes "this is what's wrong with modern architecture", but... this is what's wrong with modern architecture. These chairs are both uncomfortable and ugly, literally just squares of plywood fastened together in the most simplistic design that could possibly be called a "chair". The only reason anyone pays attention to them is because of the aura of prestige that they accrue from coming from a famous designer. And yes, I'm aware that this is furniture not architecture, but this is in Architectural Digest, and the sensibility that leads to people cooing over these chairs is the same sensibility that leads to architects making ugly, non-functional buildings that everyone hates except other architects.
I'm willing to sacrifice some function to form. But damn I have my limits, and these chairs are way past mine.
I just bought a new desk for my office at home. Functionally speaking, it's worse than my old, L-shaped one. The old one had more usable space on it, had good depth in the corner for my displays and laptops, with plenty of desktop in front for writing or whatnot. It also took less space in the room, because of its shape.
But it was plain, kinda shabby, and didn't spark any joy.
The new desk is gorgeous[0]. Rosewood finish with a floating top and pretty legs and all that. It sits in the middle of the room. I have to use a coaster now with drinks. I have to take care not to bang my chair into it, or carelessly throw my keys on it, etc.
And it's worth it. I really like just looking at this, more than I miss the convenience of the old L-shaped desk. It might not be everyone's taste, but I have a hard time believing that even those who don't care for it don't at least see how I could.
But these chairs? I just don't see it. Its one thing to be uncomfortable. Fine. But try not to be ugly while you're at it. I might also be "that guy", though?
It's very pretty. Congratulations on your purchase and all that ... but my whole body noticeably recoiled when I looked at it. I felt instant anticipation of knocked knees, and the stiff and precise manner in which I would need to comport myself around it so as not to cause damage to it, or me.
I'm honestly contemplating replacing my chair with one that has no wheels. Glides, maybe. But once it's in position, I don't want it to move too easily.
Yeah, I know that what I'm doing is equivalent to putting the charging port on the bottom of the Apple mouse. I don't care :)
It's very comfortable. Since the beginning of my nomadism, I've mostly used non-wheeled chairs, and it's done wonders for my comfort and physical health. Office chairs and even "ergonomic" chairs are overrated. The biggest improvement I've seen has come from changing my position frequently and not being in the same position for hours on end.
Yesterday I was sitting on a hard wood chair. Today I'm sitting on a plastic outdoor lawn chair. I'm comfortable in both, and I feel great.
Thanks! I've had sneaking suspicion that the fancy mesh and swivels are not really needed. When I was in school, I'd spend hours each day in hard wood or plastic chairs. Never had an issue with it at all.
If my butt gets sore, then I'll just have to stand up and walk around a bit.
Many of the variations are also structurally unsound.
Regarding modern architecture, and design like this, I honestly think there's a measure of "since it's so ugly, it must be avant-garde so I'll pretend to like it". I mean statistically speaking, if ugliness wasn't a goal in itself, wouldn't modern architects at least sometimes come up with beautiful designs?
> The only reason anyone pays attention to them is because of the aura of prestige that they accrue from coming from a famous designer.
Then again, aren’t famous designers famous—at least in part—because they are good at designing? I think it’s reasonable to pay attention to their designs, or to expect them to be any good.
In this case, though, I feel like your ‘aura’ explanation makes some sense, because Donald Judd is mostly famous as a visual artist. His minimalist visual art isn’t really concerned with the practical details a furniture designer might worry about, and in the context of furniture design his modernist aesthetic is nothing remarkable. So I guess the aura of his visual art and his aura as an artist would play a big role for people who acquire these chairs.
I think this is why we have "periods" in arts and design.
Someone discovers something, for example, that if you design your UI to resemble real life objects people who are introduced to touch interface for the first time will have easer time understanding it. Then everyone follows without much thinking about the original idea behind that design and eventually you run out of people who are first timers to touch interfaces but everyone keeps doing design for them(probably unknowingly, simply because they think this is what good design is). Then, someone recognises this problem, now discovers that if you get rid of the skeuomorphism that is no longer functional you can actually improve the usability because leather texture is a distraction and eats from the valuable screen estate and you can introduce advanced UI for the touch literate people by embracing that this is a computer and not the physical object that it mimics. Now everyone is in flat design, everything is maximally minimal and people race to put as less visual clues as possible. You end up with UI where you can't tell what's button and what's just text and it's time for a new period in design.
I think it's the same with architecture or any type of industrial design. Someone discovers that you can make something functional for very cheap and the word on the street is that all you need is a few pieces of wood to have a chair. It's not as comfortable as the artisan chairs but it is 10x cheaper, so it's cool. Later people realize that they have enough chairs already but they would like something more comfortable and they might be actually willing to pay a bit more. Someone discovers that you can make significantly more comfortable chairs using this new material called plastic and the costs will be just as low. Welcome to the era of plastic chairs and this will last until people recognise that plastic might not be the greatest material ever.
In some regard, It's the same thing over and over again. "Transistors are the greatest thing!", 30 years later you have "The best way to enjoy music is to go transistorless". Probably because with each transition you lose something and once you reap the benefits of the new thing, you realize that something is missing. Maybe you go full e-book and you realize that you lose the artwork in the books that is possible thanks to high quality print? Maybe not everyone but at least some people do and they look for a solution. If they find a good one, it may define the next era.
Therefore, design can be good or bad depending on the context and can be bad today but iconic if it has become the icon of an era. Owning an iconic item is definitely something notable, it says something about you. Maybe it says that you lived in that era, maybe you appreciate that era as a reference point to help you to appreciate or understand the modern era?
My thoughts exactly: "hey, if I get some boards from the DIY store and screw them together, I get a terribly uncomfortable chair. If Donald Judd does it, people will fork out 3500 dollars to get one."
Go ahead and do it. Shouldn't cost you more than 50 bucks for the plywood.
Judd is working with very simple elements to create a spectrum of cube spatial partitions. (Compare Red and Green chairs in frontpiece pic of the blog post. Note the recessed element in both.) This actually does take spatial design talent.
He is also working with color. A simple device of non-coated edges is providing 'structural' sense.
Finally, he's playing a little numbers game. Looks like all those chairs use 5 planes.
They suck as furniture, but are compact expressions of a genuine strain of architectural thought.
My father has been making chairs from 1973 to 2016. I've grown up around the factory and all I can say is that wooden chairs are probably the most difficult piece of furniture to be produced. There is a lot of fiddling around angles and slopes and math. A typical wooden chair is made up of at least 12 different wooden parts to be joined together with tenons, mortises and all that jazz. Calling that apples box a chair is insulting. I am sorry, I know I sound crabbed, but that's just the truth...
This is so true. Chairs are fantastically difficult to make well, and especially to design. A successful chair has to deal with hundreds of pounds of stress on small joints for decades on end, typically using only traditional joinery and glue. The proportions and fit have to be just right, the surfaces have to be durable.
> Calling that apples box a chair is insulting. I am sorry, I know I sound crabbed, but that's just the truth...
Haha, it seems everyone on this thread thinks the same. Its just plywood squares put together. At some stage someone has to say it 'The king is naked'.
Arch Digest is a terrible place to read about anything related to art or design.
Judd was a seminal artist, and has some fantastically sharp essays(0), which are well worth reading. I agree that the chairs are not practical, but conceptually I think they're brilliant. Having such a pure vision (of reducing an object to its most essential form) and executing on it, I think is admirable. I think you're missing the point if you approach Judd from a practical position, and disregard the value of his ideas.
But is it reasonable to call that its most essential form when that form is so anatomically wrong?
In other words, if a chair so badly fits most humans, should it be called a chair? A sphere can be used as a chair, and it is even simpler or more pure design-wise, but we don’t call it a chair.
Don's rebuttal; "I am often told that the furniture is not comfortable, and in that not functional. The source of the question is in the overstuffed bourgeois Victorian furniture, which, as I said, never ceased. The furniture is comfortable to me. Rather than making a chair to sleep in or a machine to live in, it is better to make a bed. A straight chair is best for eating or writing. The third position is standing." - 'It's Hard To Find A Good Lamp' 1993
No, narrow-hipped perhaps. Just look at those awful, awful chairs. Nothing whatsoever that admits a human being will sit in them. No, its hunky-dory goofy thinking that leads to 'it looks like a chair, so it must be a chair'. Only an artist could think that.
Sure furniture could be pretty. But it has to, at root, function for humans.
I'm happy for you, that you are so secure in your world view. Personally I try to challenge mine as often as possible, and avoid dismissing things before I understand them. I hoped that you might find a quick introduction to a booming movement in design and art interesting, I'm sorry I wasted your time!
With all that superior learning about what's true furniture and what's not, I look forward to seeing you attending a staff meeting in a plywood box chair. I'm sure the joy of its beauty will still be with you as you go to the chiropractor for weekly treatments.
Listen, don't feel sad about still missing the point with Judd after 5 days, it's not that embarrassing. I almost feel the need to help you understand it. You can bring a horse to water I suppose...
Maybe you should consider some Superior Learning TM, and stop having fantasies about staff meetings or whatever.
(in all seriousness, it's been fun sparring with you)
Judd is also one of the artists who went out and colonized Marfa, Texas in the 1980s.
Far West Texas is beautiful on its own. It didn't need the arrogance of simplistic and nihilistic concrete and steel boxes left in the land like an abandoned worksite.
Marfa is a delightful place, but if Judd had never set-up shop down there, it would be yet another West Texas ghost-town today.
There's something special about the spareness of the landscape and Judd's works in them. It makes the touristy aspects of Marfa tolerable to an extent.
A chair has utility. Nobody sitting on those back-aching butt-hurting pine boards is going to want to sit on them for long. They're designed to be un-chairs, places where the function of 'chair' is denied.
Sure they look cool. And if we all lived in FlatLand and were geometric shapes, a functional house might look like those pictures. But not here in reality.
Even the Aeron is uncomfortable after a while. I left Aeron chairs after 10 years and switched to standing. 15 years later, I feel so much better. Also, it’s now so much faster to come and go from my desk.
I went from a seated desk to a standing desk to a sit/stand situation that I switch back and forth between throughout the day. Been with it for about five years now.
I came to realize that it’s not sitting or standing that is necessarily bad (especially if you have a good ergo chair and make at least some attempt at maintaining a healthy posture), it’s staying in the same position for very long periods that wreaks havoc on your body.
Then again you can take the design to any carpenter and it won’t be too expensive to have one made. Judd who is famous first and foremost as an artist always had his works manufactured by others, I think he liked the idea of removing the artist’s personal ‘handwriting’. Ironically, he still played within the gallery system, where the gallery and the artist get to mark certain pieces as “authentic” and create limited editions.
Many timber stores can cut the material on customer's request, so you probably don't even need the carpenter - just order parts, to size, and bolt them together.
I don't remember where the precise quote or where it's from, but it's some documentary about design and is goes something like: "Why do uncomfortable chairs still exist?"
As a counterweight to the other opinions here, I'll just say that I think these chairs, particularly when grouped together, are immensely beautiful. I understand they are not intended as chairs one sits in for eight hours a day, but as lightweight, easy-to-make occasional furniture. There are other examples of Judd's furniture, mostly the desks[1] and tables[2], that are more 'practical' in the traditional sense, and which could even be described as approachable and warm.
I actually made a copy of his library bed[3] out of plywood last year, and intend to make some of these chairs (and maybe one of the desks) when I have some time this summer. I believe this is what the furniture was intended for: easy DIY replication, minimum of fuss with the maximum aesthetic impact. Easy to understand if one is familiar with Judd's work as an artist/sculptor, which is obviously the biggest influence on his furniture. You could also look to Gerrit Rietveld, Enzo Mari, and Shaker furniture as background for Judd's designs. I'd recommend reading his 1993 essay "It's Hard To Find A Good Lamp" [4] and seeking out a PDF of his (very rare) 'Furniture Retrospective' book[5], which places this work in its proper context. As he says in that essay, "Conventions are not worth reacting to one way or another."
As an aside, it is frustrating to read (over and over again) that one could only like this work, and work like it, out of some cooler-than-thou pretence. This is a very common bad faith response to art and design that does not (and does not seek to) conform to traditional expectations. As someone whose tastes run very much in a modernist direction, I find the assertion that "since it's so ugly, it must be avant-garde so I'll pretend to like it" ungenerous and shallow. Is it that difficult to accept that there are other ways of looking at the world, other traditions and other intentions? I'm not saying it's all good (when was it ever?), but the assumption of bad faith in those who respond to it is wrong.
We were using a consultant for a while whose (temporary, I believe) office was in a friend's architecture office/studio. I remember seeing these very artsy steel-tubing-and-leather-sheets-at-weird-angles chairs, and scoffing. My boss (who had been there before) said, No, go sit in them. On that dare, I did, and WOW, were they comfortable!
So, yeah, some architects can design comfortable seating. But not all.
