The history of furniture design
In the West, the history of furniture is strongly rooted in temporal functionality; bureaus evolved from stacked wooden crates carted from residence to residence by nomadic rulers, and even as late as the seventeenth century, chairs were placed around the perimeter to be pulled into social groupings as needed.
In the East, the practice of privileging space over furniture largely endured until the integration of Western conventions in the years after the Second World War.
In tandem with the practical forces behind the evolution of furniture (the affordance of temporary comfort), hierarchical distinctions between pieces of status and pieces of service became manifest in typologies (state bed vs. sleeping pallet) and craftsmanship (Craft).
The self-conscious succession of styles began in the Renaissance with references to antiquity, and received added momentum with the discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii in the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, the notion of attaching cultural and political values to furnishings was common practice, yielding a series of vogues ranging from Neo-Renaissance to Egyptian and Gothic revival. Another motivation for the accelerated rate of stylistic shifts was the introduction of mass production with the Industrial Revolution.
Both anxiety about the loss of handwork and enthusiasm for the potential of a more democratic means of manufacture and distribution were evident at cusp of the twentieth century, with Art Nouveau resisting rationalization, Mission style taking a more equivocal stance toward the machine, and Art Deco enthusiastically embracing it. More socially ambitious were the early modernists ( Modernity) who actively referenced the changes wrought on daily life by mass production. Populist innovations associated with the Bauhaus, such as Marcel Breuer’s 1926 Wassily Chair (said to be inspired by tubular steel used for bicycles) radically changed the material landscape of furniture design.
Over the course of the twentieth century, the overt industrial character of these early experiments was gradually tempered, notably by the Scandinavian predilection for natural materials and organic lines. In the nascent twenty-first century, furniture is in a state that might be best described as one of extrapolation, clearly profiting from the late twentieth-century’s art furniture movements, themselves built on the foundations of 1960s Pop Art. The biggest influences on contemporary furniture, however, can be traced to the 1980s. This was the decade that saw the emergence of postmodern ( Postmodernism) historicist styles, forays into the field by prominent architects (Michael Graves, Robert
Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown), increased experimentation with irregular mass and materiality (Gaetano Pesce’s poured-resin furniture), and the acceptance of furniture as functional sculpture (Scott Burton’s bluntly carved stone seating and the Memphis group’s iconoclastic furnishings). Collectively, this diverse group of architects, artists, and designers created important precedents for liberties increasingly normative in the design industry today.
Recent work by furniture designers exhibits a deliberately tenuous relationship to the qualities of stability and solidity once requisite of tables, chairs, beds, wall screens, and shelves. No longer are precious woods and rare metals considered to be the only appropriate materials for furniture.
Today, materials are exploited not only for their practicalitya Bauhaus concern but also for their narrative and their structural capacities, be they cut felt in the case of Toord Boontje, stiffened rope in the case of Marcel Wanders, wood and fabric scraps derived from the favelas of S¼o Paolo, as per Fernando and Humberto Campana, or the “twig” screens of extruded plastic used by Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec. Today, subtlety and singular purpose have given way to multiple readings, reflecting the larger social experience of plurality and simultaneity fostered by the proliferation of communication media, from the World Wide Web to television to satellite radio.
There is evidence that designers are responding to the non-linear behaviors of these media by collapsing historical references into modern materials such as clear plastic, exemplified in the Louis Ghost Chair (1996) by Philippe Starck, the French designer known for his Swiftian games of scale. More overtly critical are works such as Dutch designer Maarten Baas’ series of charred, blackened furniture entitled Smoke (2004) that comments on destruction and memory. Distinctions are also blurring in the programmatic applications of furniture.
There is a weakening of the segregation of furnishings produced for institutions and offices and those produced for the residence: the contract furniture industry is taking its cues from the home as the work week grows longer; and it is increasingly common to find office furniture (such as Bill Stumpf’s iconic 1994 AeronChair) in thehome,nowthat the computer has become a domestic appliance.
This process has been aided and abetted with the rise of companies that allowconsumers to purchase furniture formerly only available through professional decorators and designers. Even firms that specialize in contract furnishing fabrics offer select lines of their upholstery to the general public. In addition, the emergence of online retail has accelerated the practice of marketing directly to the customer.
The proliferation of print publications devoted to design can also be credited with engendering widespread popular interest in mid-century modern furniture, once considered a rarified taste. In some cases, this was done by plumbing historical archives and in others by marking anniversaries with special sales promotions, as with the Eames lounge chair in 2006.
Furthermore, mass-market commercial chains have begun to commission designers, normally showcased at boutiques, to create affordable versions of their work for the mass market. Furniture has always served as a laboratory for ideas about living. Today, however, the rapid absorption of those ideas into the marketplace as social brand marks of taste has accelerated both the pace of experiment and the frequency of stylistic revivals. Unique to this moment is the conflation of both.