Is the best chair design no chair at all?
Takeaways from "The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design" By Galen Cranz
I came across this book while browsing "Half Price Books" in Berkeley, California. While the title drew me in, I initially thought the author's western name indicated the book would be just another story on iconic western chair designs. However, flipping through the book presented something different and intriguing. From the modern modification of the last supper to depict chairs (when in actuality Roman-style banquets lacked chairs at the time), to the new ideas of body-conscious design, and methods to accommodate the body beyond interior design, the book offered many practical ways to think about the built world, the human body, and social meaning. Here are some takeaways from the book:
Chairs Are More Than Ergonomics
Cranz begins by establishing the cultural meaning of chairs and their importance in dictating our home, school, office, hospital, outdoor, and culinary lives. Here is a passage from Cranz that breaks down the cultural importance of the chair:
"Yet despite their intimate place in our lives, we know little about them and their effects on us, physically and mentally. Without a doubt, their effects are profound. What is true of the chair is true of all the artifacts we create. We design them; but once built, they shape us. As sitting in chairs spread to the common person over the centuries, it left its mark on the human body and human consciousness. The chair offers a glimpse into our collective ideas about status and honor, comfort and order, beauty and efficiency, discipline and relaxation. As our ideas change, so do our chairs. Because our current ideas about seating originated in the past, understanding contemporary chairs requires an appreciation of their social history, ancient and modern. Their development as objects of art also deserves attention since part of our emotional relationship with them derives from the way they mix style and status. By comparing the use of chairs in Western culture to practices in cultures without chairs, we will find chairs are true cultural artifacts, not, as we often imagine, mere extent of our bodies (16)."
Chairs represent more than just ergonomic extensions of our nuanced bodies. When asking children in Australia to pick chairs, most overlooked the most ergonomically comfortable chairs in favor of larger chairs (some so large that the kid's feet would dangle). "These children have learned that the bigger the chair, the more power and status accrues to the sitter. Studies conducted with American children in the late 1950s found that most of them visualized God sitting on a throne or chair" (64). What messages of seating do we pass on? How do social and cultural movements shape how chairs will change in the next 10 years?
What's Wrong With Chairs: The Health Hazards
Cranz wastes no time in identifying bad chairs. While I initially expected a book on chair design to praise many iconic chairs, Cranz proceeds to 'evaluate' many iconic chairs as poor for the human body (*she roasts a lot of famous chairs). Chiefly, she notes the humping and "C" position that results from many uncomfortable chairs. Here are a few examples of that "C" position: Previous Next
These graphics help explains that challenge of maintaining a position in a chair: it's just not natural to maintain 'proper posture.' Maybe we shouldn't chastise children in school or adults at work for being fidgety.
New Ergonomics to Drive Body-Conscious Design
Having established many shortfalls of chairs to support the human body, Cranz lays chair performance guidelines and a framework for new mindsets:
“A body conscious attitude offers new criteria by which to evaluate the environment. In interior architecture and planning, a research specialty called “post-occupancy evaluation” tries to determine to what extent the environment has served people the way it was intended. (213)”
While universal ergonomic standards seem simple enough, many chairs fail to meet some of these basic standards:
Chair seats should not be too high: 17 inches could be a safe compromise (to design for the mythical "average" -which often turns out to be a tall male) to minimize cutting under the knee but multiple sizes or adjustable heights are the most body conscious. Both feet should be able to fully rest on the floor
The front rail should curve downward: again to minimize cutting under the knee which restricts circulation and increases unnatural load bearing in legs
Depth and width of the seat should be 17 inches: Surprisingly this fits a large range of body sizes as the thigh bone has the lowest standard deviation of any bone in the body. Most chairs fail to have 17 inches of usable seat depth
Weight should be distributed through the bones, not flesh: When you sit, you should feel it in your bones, not your flesh. Bones were built to be load bearing while flesh and muscle is not. When you sit, your sit bones should carry about 60% of your weight with 40% transferred down to your heels (which should be fully rested on the floor)
Space between seat and back is preferable to continuous support: The lack of space for our butts puts us back into the "C" position to accommodate.
Cranz also lays out many examples of seating that successfully address the health hazards of seating
The forward leaning school desk: This chair design encourages multi-posture seating, rejecting the idea that there is a single stiff proper posture. Often times, children are relegated to standardized fixed desks and chairs that fail to recognize the immense growth their bodies are going through.
Kneeling chairs: Some call kneeling chairs the most radical chair design of the 20th century. These chairs depart from conventional 90 degree sitting, utilizing larger oblique angles to reduce the tendency to hump the back.
Footstools and reading stands: These peripheral furniture pieces can help meet more body-conscious needs when a single chair cannot. For instance, in the chance that a chair fails to allow its user to have feet fully planted on the floor (to help distribute weight), a foot stool could help the sitter.
Stools: Stools offer a nice middle ground that more actively use the whole body. While they still accommodate 90 degree sitting, they encourage more autonomous sitting through torso engagement.
Moving Beyond Chair Design
After discussing new ergonomics, Cranz moves into discussing "beyond interior design." These behavioral and environment methods look beyond the design of a single chair to promote body-conscious sitting. These new seating practices also present new opportunities to innovation social interactions and meaning. Some examples include removing furniture to rely on rugs and mats. Crawling and squatting would also allow adults to relate to infants more easily. Other examples rethink the need for tradition seating in the living room, office, and other public spaces. Previous Next
Cranz cleverly discusses the prospect of challenging collective consensus on what appears to be biological:
"In considering how to reduce our dependence on chairs in rooms and even outdoor spaces, larger questions about cultural, social, and psychological change emerge: how does it happen, when, how difficult is it, what opportunities lie ahead? Can we really change the practice of sitting in chairs? It is embedded so deeply in our culture that it seems natural, meaning virtually biological, and therefore not susceptible to change. But rather than being natural, chair sitting exemplifies what the anthropologist Edward Hall calls"formal" knowledge that we learn at our mother's knee primarily through observation of behavior without even knowing that we know it. This is in fact unconscious knowledge, which is harder to change than either the rational/technical knowledge we learn in schools or the informal knowledge that people tell us in the process of living? The difficulty of changing an unconscious practice like chair sitting includes resistance to the subject by dismissing it as absurd or trivial. Nevertheless, even formal knowledge can and does change (209)"
Ultimately, this book surprised me through its thoughtful deconstruction of chair ergonomics and social impacts. I wouldn't have expected a book that was published in 1998 to remain relevant today. In fact, with the changes to the office and home brought on my the Covid pandemic and rise of remote work, the messages in this book are more important than ever.
On another note...
I saw this note scrawled on inside the cover. It is a personalized thank you note to Jordan. I can't tell if the signature is Galen Cranz's. The author Galen Cranz, Ph.D. is a professor at Berkeley's graduate school of Architecture. Given how I picked up this book at a Berkeley book store I wonder if this is her note and gift to a student in one of her classes (all the way from 1998?)
If so, it's intriguing to wonder how it ended up in my possession. What's this object's history? Did every student in the class receive a personalized gift from this professor? How did Jordan end up departing with a gift? Was it intentional or accidental?