We’ve always been a bit nutty about furniture design, and chairs are some of our favorites. Indeed, there’s a Vitra Design Museum chair poster hanging in our office.
So we were geeked to see that Vitra has a new 90-minute documentary out called Chair Times, going through over 150 years of amazing design of the humble chair.
Even if you care little about architecture or design, there are countless chairs featured in the free film that you’ve seen before or would recognize. From early designs like the butterfly chair and the cafe chairs that we take for granted to avant-garde sculptural experiments, Vitra beautifully documents the history of these pieces.
Chair Times was directed by Heinz Bütler and released by Vitra in 2018. It gathers 125 chairs from the Vitra Design Museum collection, from Michael Thonet’s bentwood café chair of 1859 to a 3D printed prototype, and lets Rolf Fehlbaum, the company’s chairman emeritus, walk through them with designers and curators including Hella Jongerius, Ruggero Tropeano and Arthur Rüegg. The museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, is worth a pilgrimage in itself, with its Frank Gehry main building and the Herzog and de Meuron Schaudepot, where the entire chair collection sits on open shelves. Chairs come up constantly on Moss and Fog. See chairs imagined out of fruit and vegetables, the Rubik’s Cube chair, an elegant chair made from salvaged fishing nets, and the designers behind many of these pieces in our reference library.
Edited by Ben VanderVeen · About Moss & Fog
