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Dutch Design Week Preview: Just Chairs by Michael Kluver

By Ray Hu - October 20, 2011

in Furniture Design

Designer Michael Kluver recently completed his degree from Design Academy Eindhoven and he's pleased to present one of his student projects, "Just Chairs," on the occasion of Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, from October 22 – 30. It's a fairly straightforward concept: Kluver has taken four iconic chair designs from the 20th century and essentially undesigned them by mapping each one to "the simple archetype form" of a chair, sort of the Platonic ideal of four legs, a seat and a back, with the "same seating height, seating width, seating depth, overall height, and angle of the backrest." Signature details are flattened and reduced to purely aesthetic elements, signifiers for more (or arguably less) idealistic design philosophies.Do we need to produce more new stuff every year? Isn't it time to slow down and look for quality and context again? A chair is for sitting. It sounds simple enough right? The original designers of these morphed chairs searched for a way of living and had an overall vision of how life should be. Over the years their designs however were ripped completely out of context and became expensive designer objects. Let us restore context again. Let them be just chairs again.

Can you identify each one? Answers after the jump...Clockwise from top left:
» Charles Rennie Mackintosh - "Hill House Chair 1" (1903)
» Gerrit Rietveld - "Red Blue Chair" (1917)
» Charles & Ray Eames - "Molded Plastic Side Chair" (with Dowel Legs) (1948) (also known as the Eiffel Chair)
» Marcel Breuer - "Wassily Chair" (1925–26)

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FHK

13 years ago

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It's not entirely a piece about if the chair has already been perfected. It's certainly not an atempt to create a new production line of chairs. It's a satirical piece that asks the question if we should not focus our energy on more interesting issues then the next chair.

So in that sense there is some thruth to the comments above, but they might have missed the punchline of the joke.
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C. L.

13 years ago

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Scanning through this was a waste of my time. And I can't get those 2 minutes back. Chairs have been perfected. Please move along...
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Martina Marieke

13 years ago

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This is sad. Really, really sad. For two reasons. First, that a student supposedly critiquing chairs, then makes more chairs. This is hypocrisy--it's like someone critique green marketing, and then coming up with another green marketing campaign. How can a "design argument" be so poor. This is ridiculous.

And basic common sense would have you ask some serious questions about the field of design coming out of Eindhoven (and the Netherlands in general). Capitalism is at a standstill, the centre of power is shifting away from the West, algorithms are the new design product and nanotechnology is becoming commonplace... and the "world's best design school" still has students wanking about chairs. Really!?

Second reason this is sad, is because design forums like Core 77 continue to cover and promote this kind of sadness without any critical thinking. Where is the brain activity? Where are the questions? This is nothing more than extending the marketing machine of the Design Academy Eindhoven, which it really shouldn't. The DAE is a very expensive private school, which makes students' tuition pay for its own marketing. And then Core 77 encourages this, extends the promotional effects. Terrible. Terrible. Absolutely terrible.

Did I mention how sad this is?
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