Chair Avatars
This is a display area for my spare chairs - my various Twitter avatars.
Why Chairs?
Chairs symbolize social interaction. They invite you to sit down and stay a while; take a load off. You're probably sitting right now. We sit down to digest news. We sit to think. We sit to be social. You might say chairs are the first social media. Okay, you wouldn't but let's pretend.
Some beautiful chairs are painful to sit on (talkin' to you Frank Lloyd Wright, and owners of Indian restaurants everywhere). Many comfy chairs can look quite ugly. Chairs can fit with all situations - from thrones to bean-bags. Lawn chairs say "relax, enjoy the weather." Kitchen chairs say "have a bite." Dentists' chairs say "sit down and scream a while."
As an early user of Twitter in '07, I began to explore a dynamic avatar idea – it was always easy to identify my feed based on the avatar's subject matter, but the actual image changed often. If you followed me and my meanderings, I hope you found the conversation fun and/or thoughtful. Pull up a chair.
The avatar history is captured below...
Mar 13, 2014
Breuer B33
Marcel Breuer is one of the big names of chair design from 1927-28. He joined the Bauhaus school in 1920 at the young age of 18. He had lifelong friends and influencers in Klee, Kandinsky and perhaps most influentially his
teacher Walter Gropius. This model, the "B33" chair is so iconic that we've all seen 100 different variants. Indeed, the structure of chrome and leather is an established vocabulary of chair design for the decades since.
Just as influential was his more elegant, less utilitarian design of Breuer's "Wassily Chair" which he made for Kandinsky, and featured earlier in my 'Avatarseum.' (It's still a fixture in spaces that attempt to be modern and avant garde 90 years later.)
The B33 looks modest and familiar to our modern eyes, we've seen it duplicated with and without arms, and with seats and backs fabricated from a myriad of materials.
Also worthy of note are the works of Le Corbusier and van der Rohe which explore some similar approaches, and materials. The style and structure of the van der Rohe chrome and leather chair from his 1927 show is clearly of the same Bauhaus-dominated period.
The cantilever design here seems slightly impossible, and demands the user trust the materials. Probably shocking when it first came about, now we plop ourselves into one without a second thought. An original 1930-ish B33 went at auction for over 1000 Euros recently.
teacher Walter Gropius. This model, the "B33" chair is so iconic that we've all seen 100 different variants. Indeed, the structure of chrome and leather is an established vocabulary of chair design for the decades since.Just as influential was his more elegant, less utilitarian design of Breuer's "Wassily Chair" which he made for Kandinsky, and featured earlier in my 'Avatarseum.' (It's still a fixture in spaces that attempt to be modern and avant garde 90 years later.)
The B33 looks modest and familiar to our modern eyes, we've seen it duplicated with and without arms, and with seats and backs fabricated from a myriad of materials.
Also worthy of note are the works of Le Corbusier and van der Rohe which explore some similar approaches, and materials. The style and structure of the van der Rohe chrome and leather chair from his 1927 show is clearly of the same Bauhaus-dominated period.
The cantilever design here seems slightly impossible, and demands the user trust the materials. Probably shocking when it first came about, now we plop ourselves into one without a second thought. An original 1930-ish B33 went at auction for over 1000 Euros recently.
