Now I Sit Me Down by Witold Rybczynski

Now I Sit Me Down by Witold Rybczynski

Author:Witold Rybczynski
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374713355
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux


Paimio lounge chair (Alvar and Aino Aalto)

Most of the Paimio furniture made its way into production. The two lounge chairs, the waiting room armchair, and the reading room chair are still being made today by Artek, a company founded by the Aaltos in 1935. We have an Artek barstool in our kitchen. The stool arrived from Finland in a flat carton, six pieces of birchwood: a circular seat covered in black linoleum, four legs, a circular brace that doubles as a footrest, and sixteen screws. The design—which dates from 1935—is not complicated. The legs are bent pieces of solid birch that are simply screwed to the underside of the seat; the circular footrest of laminated birch is similarly attached to the legs. The fourteen-inch-diameter seat is generous, and the legs splay slightly to create more stability. A stool is a utilitarian sort of seat, but this one has attitude.

The key to Aalto’s designs was the bent leg. “In furniture design the basic problem from an historical—and practical—point of view is the connecting element between the vertical and horizontal pieces,” he wrote. “I believe this is absolutely decisive in giving the style its character.” This is apparent in cabriole chairs, Windsor chairs, and bentwood café chairs. Aalto devised an original method of bending solid birch. The wood was kerfed, that is, thin slots were cut into one end. After the piece was soaked in water and briefly steamed, plywood strips coated with glue were slid into the kerfs. Then the piece was bent to the required angle in a mold. Aalto called the L-shaped leg a “bent knee.” It could serve equally well for a chair, a stool, or a table.

Although Aalto designed chairs that are actually more suited to mass production than many of their tubular steel cousins, he abhorred standardization, which he called “industrial violence against individual taste.” What makes his chairs so appealing is that while they are factory-made objects and use standardized components, they don’t look standardized. They are not handcrafted, yet they somehow carry a human imprint. The plywood is generally painted, but solid wood is always coated with clear lacquer so the grain of the pale birch comes through. The shapes have more to do with the world of nature than with abstract geometry. “There are only two things in art,” said Aalto, “humanity or its lack.” That conviction comes through, too.



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