Every Era Has Its Chair

Elke tijd zijn stoel sketches the conceptual world behind an everyday piece of furniture using a number of historic and famous designs as examples. There are chairs that render visible the ideas of an era and others whose novel forms and materials proved revolutionary.

Architects, designers and artists often produce chairs. A chair is a faster, cheaper way of making a statement than a building, and it can be a more accessible and effective means of communication than a manifesto.

Chairs have always served the same purpose: they give us a place to sit down. Yet our relationship to sitting has changed over the centuries. Van Rooy explains pieces like Willem Penaat’s Everzwijn, Marcel Breuer’s Wassily, Friso Kramer’s Revolt and Gijs Bakker’s Strokenstoel and situates each in the appropriate cultural context.

The author’s grandfather, the architect H.P. Berlage, appears throughout the book as a reference point and structuring element. Through copious anecdotes and original quotations, Van Rooy looks at more than a century of outstanding chair designs, from Berlage’s own work to Henk Stallinga’s De Nieuwe Berlage, revealing how much meaning dwells in this simple everyday object. There are countless stories of people and their chairs.

Van Rooy writes: “With arms, legs, a back and a seat, [the chair] most closely approaches the human figure. Look at a chair and you see a person sitting. This piece of furniture comes closer to us than any other in a literal sense, too: we feel it with our bodies, perceive its character, experience its qualities.”