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Most of our conscious life is spent sitting. Whether at a computer, eating meals, reading or watching television, we all use chairs. Remarkably, chairs are also one of the most difficult forms of design to master, having to be both innovative and comfortable. Not surprisingly, renowned architects have designed some of the world’s best selling chairs. These include Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus designers, Florence Knoll, Charles and Ray Eames and Arne Jacobsen. Today, through mass production, these pieces of art are affordable and accessible for many people. They are arguably the most useable and tactile forms of sophisticated applied art or design.
One of the earliest and most prolific chair designers, also known as a pioneer of modern architecture, was Le Corbusier. Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris on 6 October 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, Le Corbusier’s family were watchmaker artists. His pseudonym arose in 1917 in Paris as his architecture career was developing. Le Corbusier only began experimenting with furniture design in 1928 for his various commissioned houses. Unlike previous designers, Le Corbusier focused on the human body. This led him to find the ideal proportions of modernist architecture in 1945, which he called the Modulor.
Le Corbusier’s first chair designs, released in 1929 for the Salon d’Automne installation, ‘Equipment for the Home’, include LC1, LC2, LC3 and LC4. His renowned LC1 sling chair consists of a thin seat made of animal fur in a reclined position supported by a chrome plated steel cube frame. His sofas LC2 and LC3, also known as Cushion Baskets, continue the cube theme. They are made of square inserts forming the cube shape covered by animal fur, all contained within... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
