Introvert position - chair designed by Andreas Lund

 

A compact and robust chair that has an unusual form of construction and proves, as always, that although a design may appear to be simple, the best simple - as here - takes a lot of work to get right.

It has a relatively thick seat in solid wood - so not with a frame - but the edge is undercut with a deep chamfer that disguises that thickness and also creates a sharp crisp line to the front edge when you see the chair in profile.

The seat also has a complex shape that is a semicircle for the back half but combined with an elongated half of a hexagon to the front.

The form of chair construction is also difficult to describe:

The seat is supported on an X with two cross pieces that are halved one over the other. These cross timbers are higher than they are wide and are cut away at the centre so that the solid seat drops down into the cross rather than sitting on top of it.

Each of these cross bars is housed directly into the turned legs … a shorter front leg at one end of the cross piece, with the mortice of the housing just below the top of the leg so that  it stands just proud of the horizontal cross piece, and a back leg at the other end with the housing for the cross bar at the centre of the leg.

That X - of the cross shape underneath the seat - is not regular with the crossing point closer to the back of the chair than to the front so, with unequal arms, the back legs are closer together than the front legs.

A kidney shaped back rest, in thin but solid wood, is gently curved and appears to be in two parts with the grain arranged symmetrically about a central horizontal axis. It is fixed an angle for comfort by cutting a flat face at the face of the upper part of the back legs.

The legs are set vertically, rather than being splayed outwards at the ground to make the chair more stable. Generally vertical legs indicate a simpler and more straightforward chair - a feature associated with country chairs made in a local workshop - and legs that are set an angle that require more precise and more complicated mortice and tenon joints are used to indicate that a chair is more sophisticated.

So one definition of a country chair is that it made in the workshop in a traditional way … barely needing thought and certainly not needing design but each slightly varying from the next as the carpenter responds to differences in each piece of wood. Although Introvert position might look like a simple country chair, it actually has carefully-determined and, of course, beautifully made with considerable precision.

 

Introvert position
MONO catalogue number 1
designed by:
Andreas Lund
produced by: Toke Overgaard

asketræ / ash
height: 77 
width: 38 
depth: 42 cm