Danish chairs of the 20th century

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Over the Autumn of 2017, just over 60 separate posts were added to the site to look at Danish chairs from the last century with a brief assessment of each that focused on details about the form and the construction and, where possible, put the design of each into a wider context.

A third of these chairs were designed by Hans Wegner and that reflects the number of chairs he designed through a long career but also, of course, his importance as a master of innovation who, as a designer, continually pushed the boundaries for what could be done and how and why.

The series was inspired by the chairs in the permanent collection of Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen where a new display was opened just over a year ago.

With a selection of chairs from the permanent collection of the museum now shown in a well-lit arrangement in a dedicated gallery where the chairs are set, each in its own display case, it is possible to look at each design without distraction and, with the chairs raised up off the floor, it is possible to look closely at how the chairs are constructed and to appreciate the techniques of the carpentry - the way that the separate parts are cut, shaped and fitted together - the finish of the wood, the use of metal for parts of the chair or, with some chairs, the whole frame, the development of new materials such as plywood or plastic and, with many of the chairs, the superb quality of the workmanship. 

In the museum, the chairs are grouped by type to introduce visitors to the idea of different forms of construction … and because it suggests trends and technical developments, that is more important than more vague classifications by style or period and certainly more important than a simple sequence by date.

This new gallery presents to the visitor a key body of research material on open access with extensive labels and information panels but in addition the museum catalogue is available on line so it is possible there to look up furniture in the collection by date, period, maker, materials and type and the index also means that it is possible to search for cross references to more information or images of other furniture by the same designer or the same maker that is not currently on display but is in the reserve collection.

It was also crucial for these recent posts here, on this web site, that last year saw the republication of the four volumes on the cabinetmakers' annual exhibitions - Dansk Mobelkunst Gennem 40 År - published by Lindhardt og Ringhof.

Edited by the designer Grete Jalk, these were published first in 1987 and record exhibitions that were held in Copenhagen each year, from 1927 through to 1966, to show the public the latest and the very best of Danish furniture.

For the first decade, the exhibitions were held at different venues in Copenhagen but, from 1937 through to the last exhibition in 1966, all but one year when the exhibition was at Charlottenborg and one year at the Forum - a total of 28 exhibitions were held at the design museum. This was remarkable and emphasises the important role that the museum had and the museum still has in showing current design - not simply to curate the design of the past - and one reason why the present exhibition Dansk Design Nu - looking at Danish design this century - is so important.

With posts here on 60 chairs, and the intention to add more, then some sort of index was necessary and arranging that by date also works as a simple time line for chairs from the 20th century. Using the search feature of the site or the categories and tags it is possible to search by designer or cabinet maker. At the very least, this proves that there was not a clear or straightforward linear progress through those decades and it suggests interesting questions about the age of designers or at which point in their career they produced a specific chair and whether, whatever their age, they were pushing boundaries or exploring for themselves a new trend or a new material.

 

The display of chairs in Designmuseum Danmark provides an amazing opportunity to not only look at the chairs up close but the lighting also meant, for me, that it is possible to look at the details - to look at how the chairs are constructed - and take photographs. Recording details of the joinery and the materials is important as fewer and fewer people learn about timber or work with wood when they are at school and it is not an aspect of design covered in many blogs but understanding how a chair is constructed reveals much about how or why a chair has a certain or a distinct look and how that relates to other chairs of the same form. 

For obvious reasons the measurements of the chairs have been given where possible because it is important to have some way of judging the scale of a design and that is rarely obvious from a photograph and particularly difficult if the photograph shows the chair without the context of a room.

But also, as I looked at more and more of the chairs and looked at the photographs from the cabinetmakers' annual exhibitions, it was clear that it is now difficult to understand these pieces of furniture in anything like an original setting and that becomes more difficult with time as many of these pieces of furniture move from being everyday objects that people have in their homes and sit on to be what are now valuable collector or museum pieces.

Some of the designers and architects themselves were clearly concerned about the setting of their furniture. From the first exhibitions in the late 1920s the cabinetmakers used room settings and much of the furniture was also aimed at a specific customer and therefore, to some extent, a known type of room … from a young couple moving into a small, new, two-room apartment through to a wealthy middle-class family buying bookshelves and a desk by Klint or chairs for a large terrace or garden … so all the chairs were designed with at least some idea of the space or the setting where the furniture would be used. 

Some designers went further. Poul Kjærholm designed with meticulous care the settings of his furniture in exhibitions and shop displays and Finn Juhl chose the colours against which his furniture was shown by producing drawings with colour wash of the room settings for the Cabinetmakers' Exhibition.

This first selection has focused on key chairs of the classic period of modern Danish furniture, so with just 60 that is not, at this point, even all the most famous chairs but at least a reasonable selection of different types of chair and different materials and a range of designers. 

One obvious problem is that this panders to the idea that Danish designers focus on chairs and it reinforces a general misconception that somehow the only period of great design in Denmark was that so-called Classic period of the 1950s and 1960s.

Therefore, the next stage for this web site will be to look at recent chairs, since the turn of the century, and present them in a similar way … looking at form and construction and context … and possibly then to look at other types of Danish furniture in the same way … so sofas and tables might be next.

This should form a growing body of material with a chance to experiment with indexing and cross referencing and posts will be updated to add to entries if more information or better photographs become available or to add more links to archive drawings and historic images.

 
First posted on 31st December 2017
INDEX to the posts on chairs from the 20th century

Chairs at Designmuseum Danmark

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looking at chairs to left or right or above or below you can see how a shape or type of chair evolved or how a form can be re-interpreted in a different material

At Designmuseum Danmark there is a relatively new display for their collection of modern chairs where the chairs are arranged by type rather than by designer or by displaying the chairs in chronological order. 

This typography puts the chairs into relatively distinct and easily identified groups where each group is defined by a form or shape and by the style of a chair … the form of the chair, techniques of working with a material and details of construction and style, all being closely interrelated.

Most of the chairs shown date from the 20th century and were made by Danish cabinetmakers or Danish manufacturers although several older chairs, several more recent Danish chairs and some chairs from outside Denmark have been included where they provide evidence for how or why or when a specific Danish design evolved or if they are relevant evidence from a specific or wider social or historic context.

Most of the chairs are made in wood but there are chairs with frames in metal tube and there are metal wire and even plastic chairs so there are interesting examples where closely-related designs - in terms of style and shape - can be seen in tube-metal alongside a version in bent-wood although obviously the techniques and the details of construction are very different.

The main groups, defined by the museum, are Folding chairs and stools; Easy chairs - so generally lower and wider chairs - and Windsor chairs - with vertical spindles across the back to support the top rail or - in taller chairs - a head rest. Chippendale chairs have a sturdy frame of square-set legs - usually with stretchers between the legs and a relatively low back and when they have arms these are housed into the uprights of the back. There is a group derived from Shaker chairs, from America - often with horizontal slats across the back rest. Chinese chairs and steam-bent chairs, are similar to the Chippendale Chairs but are distinct in terms of the sitting position which is more upright and more formal and generally the top of the back rail sweeps round into arm rests as a single curve rather than in separate pieces. Round arm chairs and Klismos chairs also have curved and relatively low back rests that continue round into arm rests - with  The Chair by Hans Wegner perhaps the most famous Danish example. A Klismos or Klismos Chair is a distinct classical or Greek type with a short but sharply-curved back rest across the top of the back uprights with legs that are usually tapered and splay out down to the floor in a curve. Shell chairs include chairs in moulded or shaped plywood, moulded plastic or metal with shapes that provide - usually in one piece - the support for the seat and back without a framework, and are usually on a separate frame of legs or on a pedestal, that itself can be made from a different material to the shell, although there are shell chairs where seat, back and support are all moulded. Moulded chairs with a shell in foam or plastic first appeared commercially in the 1950s and moulded plastic chairs have by this century become almost ubiquitous in the collections of most Danish manufacturers. The final group identified by the museum are Cantilever chairs where normally there is a strong base on the floor and some form of support for the front of the seat but no legs or support under the back of the seat - an interesting but not a common type in Denmark. 

chair by PV Jensen Klint circa 1910

armchair by Kaare Klint 1922

JH505 the Cow Horn Chair by Hans Wegner 1952

Ant shell chair by Arne Jacobsen 1951

EKC12 in tubular steel by Poul Kjærholm 1962

PK15 by Poul Kjærholm 1978

all in the collection of Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen

 

The study and analysis of chair designs from different periods has been an important part of the training for designers in Danish schools of architecture and schools of design for a century.  

In the 1920s, the architect Kaare Klint was responsible for the conversion and the fittings of the buildings of an 18th-century hospital to form an appropriate exhibition space for the museum of Danish design - then called the Kunstindustrimuseet Danmark. Klint taught design in the museum where he encouraged architects and furniture designers to study and draw historic pieces and to study and appreciate cabinet making techniques even if they were not craftsmen themselves and he emphasised the close relationship between design and the techniques of construction.

This division of chair types in the design museum is different from the groups set out by Nicolai de Gier and Stine Liv Buur in their important book Chairs' Tectonics where their primary divisions are by material and then by the form and structure … so they look specifically at how the seat, back rest and support or legs are joined or fixed together and take that as the starting point for their classification of chair types.

Designerof the new display: Boris Berlin of ISKOS-BERLIN Copenhagen

Curator of the collection: Christian Holmsted Olesen.
Graphic design: Rasmus Koch Studio.
Light design: Jørgen Kjær/Cowi Light Design and Adalsteinn Stefansson.
Graphic design: Rasmus Koch Studio.

 

note:

this was initially posted on the 2 October but has been moved up to make a more-sensible introduction to the series of posts about chairs posted through October 2017. The chairs were selected because they are important examples from major Danish designers but they also cover all the types of chair in the design museum typology.

These posts on chairs are also an experiment for this site in trying to present more photographs and slightly more information than is normal in a blog to highlight and analyse key features of each design. 

Selecting the category a Danish chair will take you to all the posts in the sequence in which they were posted and there is also a new time line to form an index to these posts:

 

Designmuseum Danmark on-line catalogue

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Designmuseum Danmark can only display a proportion of their collection and, even when an object is shown in a gallery or exhibition, there is usually a limit to how much information can be included on a label or in a leaflet or guide so the on-line catalogue of the museum is an amazing desk-top resource for finding out more about an object or more about a designer or a manufacturer.

There is a separate index for the museum's collection of furniture and this can be searched by category or by a specific year or a decade; by the name of the designer or the cabinetmaker / manufacturer or with key words and the search can be narrowed down by selecting, for instance, a type of wood from a drop-down list.

 

Inevitably, the amount of information revealed through the search varies slightly from object to object - the museum points out that the catalogue is being updated as new information becomes available - but there is usually a photograph and often several view points, and there are dimensions; materials; usually a date of acquisition and - if the piece was purchased by the museum rather than given as a gift - there is often the name of the auction house and a date because sale catalogues can be an important source for more information. Particularly for what is called provenance so the history of ownership for a more important or a more unusual work. For major objects there can be a specific bibliography if it has been included in a publication or an exhibition catalogue. 

Designmuseum Danmark on-line site was redesigned recently and the catalogue of the collection can now be found from the front page by following the options or links:

Designmuseum Danmark home page / Library / Search in the collections / Furniture Index

why does Denmark produce so many 'good' chairs?

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the display of the collection of chairs at Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen

 

Chairs are a common pieces of furniture in most modern homes around the world but the chair has a special - almost an iconic place - in the history of modern design in Denmark.

At the design museum in Copenhagen, in a relatively new gallery, chairs from their collection are each given their own space; each elevated and each given spotlights that are set to come on as you approach.

Don't get me wrong … this is not a criticism … actually far far from a criticism because by lifting the chairs up from their normal place - on the floor with and amongst other furniture - you can appreciate the different designs; you can look at the details and see how the chairs are put together; and with the chairs arranged in groups you begin to see how they fit into a context or a sequence of similar or of very different chairs and, above all, you can see how well made most of them are … so they certainly deserve our attention.

But then take a step back … so why so many different beautiful chairs and from a relatively short period of time? - most in the gallery date from the period from 1930 to the last decade of the last century - and why so many chairs from a relatively small country?

They receive well-deserved acclaim and not just in Denmark but internationally - so much so that these chairs are widely imitated and, in some cases, they are copied so carefully that some are passed off as originals. Some chairs from the 1950s and 1960s, by certain designers, now achieve almost eye-watering amounts of money in auctions. And yet they were all made simply so that we can sit down.

read more

 

the Shaker rocking chair in the collection at Designmuseum Danmark

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Designmuseum Danmark gives this rocking chair from the United States a prominent place in the introduction at the entrance to their gallery of modern Danish chairs and so, by implication, an important place in the story of Danish furniture in the 20th century. 

There are obvious links with the style and form of chairs designed by Ole Wanscher, Hans Wegner and Børge Mogensen and others in the 1940s and 1950s but I did not appreciate the complicated history of this chair or understand its direct influence until I read the account set out by Gorm Harkær in his monograph on Kaare Klint that was published in 2010.

In 1919 Kaare Klint took over teaching technical drawing for cabinetmakers at the Technical Society's school. His approach to furniture design was clearly set out in his programme where he states that the school "will not try to teach you to perform so-called beautiful specious Drawings where the whole room is reflected in the Furniture Polish: we will try to teach you to draw accurate and realistic line drawings. We will not try to teach you to draw Artworks in different Styles, but try to show you the beauty that lies in the perfect simple Design and Usability."

 
RP00074A.jpg

In the collection of Designmuseum Danmark but not currently on display… copy of a Shaker rocking chair made in beech by Rud. Rasmussen in 1942. The catalogue entry RP00074 gives the designer as Kaare Klint. Note the elongated vase-shaped turning at the top of the front legs above the seat that copies the form of the chair owned by Einar Utzon-Frank and drawn by O Brøndum Christensen in 1927 rather than the pronounced taper or thinning down of the upper part of the front leg on the Shaker chair purchased by the museum in 1935

In 1924 Klint was appointed an assistant professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, in a newly-established Department of Furniture Design, where, again, he emphasised the importance of measuring and drawing good examples of historic furniture and that took up much of the first year of his course. In 1927 Klint described these drawings as "the beginning of an archive of furniture studies." *

The Department of Furniture Design was then in the Danish Museum of Art & Design - now Designmuseum Danmark - and not in the main academy building in the palace of Charlottenborg. Students made carefully-measured drawings of a number of key pieces in the museum collection including a chair by the 18th-century English furniture maker Thomas Chippendale and these study drawings could then be used as a starting point for the design of a modern chair. 

The Danish sculptor Einar Utzon-Frank, who also taught at the Royal Academy, owned a rocking chair that was described as "in the American Colonial style" and that chair was surveyed in 1927 by O Brøndum Christensen. A precisely-measured drawing of a Shaker chair at a scale of 1:5 and photographs taken of the chair in 1928 survive. **

Then, in 1935, in an auction, the museum bought this Shaker Rocking chair, very close to the form of the chair owned by Utzon-Frank, and it was recorded in the acquisition index as A32/1935 where it is described as a shawl-back rocker with a cushion rail … that is the thin turned, slightly curved bar that runs across the back at the top of the back posts of the back rest of the chair.

In 1937 Edward and Faith Andrews published Shaker Furniture and, after a copy of that book was acquired by the museum library in 1941, it appears that Kaare Klint began a correspondence with American museums about Shaker furniture. ***

The following year, in 1942, Rud. Rasmussens Snedkerier - the cabinetmakers who worked closely with Kaare Klint and made much of the furniture that he designed - made a copy of the Utzon-Frank chair. They appear to have used the survey drawing by O Brøndum Christensen because the upper part of the front legs of the Rud. Rasmussen chair - with an elongated, turned, baluster shape above the seat rail - matches the Utzon-Frank chair rather than the chair owned by the museum that has long, elegant tapering or thinning down of the front leg between the seat rail and where it is housed into the underside of the arm rest.

Also in 1942, Kaare Klint produced designs for a number of chairs in a Shaker-style for FDB - the Danish Co-op - who had just set up a new office for furniture design. Two chairs - one with arms and one without arms and given the numbers J20 and J21 - were made as prototypes by Fritz Hansen Eftf although in the end they were not put into production.  ****

the chair designed for FDB - photographed in the exhibition on the work of Kaare Klint at Designmuseum Danmanrk

 

The original rocking chairs - the Utzon-Frank chair and the museum rocking chair - were made in workshops at one of the Shaker communities in America and, from their design, probably at Mount Lebanon where the settlement had been established in 1787 and continued right through until 1947. The religious movement of the Shakers had originated in England but many of the group emigrated to America from the north west - particularly from Lancashire - in search of a more tolerant place to practice their nonconformist beliefs. They took with them ideas and styles and local carpentry techniques which influenced the buildings they constructed and the furniture and panelling and fittings that they made in the settlements they established. Then, having built themselves farm houses, schools and chapels, and because the religious settlements were rural and generally self sufficient and relatively isolated - so by nature closed or inward looking - then these styles and designs became rather fixed. In fact, rocking chairs of this design appear in auction house catalogues where some are given a late date of manufacture - some examples dating from early in the 20th century.

So although Klint was not exactly admiring a contemporary chair nor was he inspired by a chair that was particularly old but nor, and perhaps more important, was it a Danish style or from a Danish tradition.

In part this should be seen as a a reaction to the poor quality of some industrial products of the period … a parallel reaction to what happened in England where architects and designers of the Arts and Crafts movement responded to what they saw as the poor design of furniture and factory-made household goods as industrial or factory production in England took over from craft and guild workshop production. In England they looked for inspiration to what they appreciated as a the better craftsmanship of traditional oak furniture of the 17th century and artisan furniture, such as Windsor chairs and cottage chairs, of the 18th century.

However, there were some significant differences between England and Denmark by the 1920s. Apart from expensive workshop furniture, made for companies like Liberties or Heal's, most traditional cabinetmakers' had long gone in England but in Copenhagen the workshops and the skills of cabinetmakers had survived - even if they felt threatened by factory production - and they were trying hard to adapt to a very different society and trying to make furniture for a different customer.

So for Kaare Klint it was more about the survival of cabinetmakers' skills rather than the revival of skills. The Shaker chair was, for him, one example of a design that he considered to be so good that it would be difficult or impossible to improve … the rocking chair was one of the few copies made by Rud. Rasmussen rather than a unique and specific design from Klint.

Klint seems to have admired the honesty and modesty of the Shaker chairs: they were straightforward … what decoration there was derived from the form and from the joinery and the techniques of the assembly … and those were the qualities that inspired the Church Chair by Klint from 1936, with Shaker-style ladder back and thin turned stretchers and the Shaker Chair also inspired designs for FDB. 

Perhaps the only thing that is surprising is that although Klint designed some of the most rational storage furniture from this period - with large pieces of furniture with cupboards and a series of drawers - he was not, it would seem, inspired by the fitted cupboards and chests of drawers that are some of the best proportioned and most beautiful pieces that were produced by the Shakers.

 

notes:

 *  Gorm Harkær, Kaare Klint, in two volumes by Klintiana (2010) page 635
** drawing RR model no. 6356 reproduced by Gorm Harkær on page 637 and the photographs page 637
*** page 367
**** Gorm Harkær reproduces the drawings and photographs of the two prototypes on pages 640 and 641

 Architects and furniture designers of the English Arts and Crafts Movement reacted to what was seen by some as the poor quality of design that was on display in the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and, generally, the poor design of factory-goods in the second half of the 19th century. A leading proponent for a return to the quality of hand-made furniture and household goods and textiles was William Morris. The Art Workers' Guild was founded in 1884 and the architect and designer C R Ashbee founded the Guild and School of Handicraft that started in London in 1888 but moved to Chipping Camden in 1902.

There were comparable Arts and Crafts movements in the Netherlands and Germany and Austria but all, inevitably, produced expensive furniture for a wealthy middle class ….. closer in character to the style of furniture in Denmark by Gottlieb Bindesbøll and his contemporaries rather than the work of Danish designers in the 20th century.

 

plywood for furniture in the 1940s

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There is an interesting group of chairs in the gallery at Designmuseum Danmark - most dating from the 1940s - that show how Danish designers and furniture makers first experimented with using plywood. 

Through the 1930s there was pressure on Danish furniture manufacturers to produce cheaper furniture, in part by moving production from the small workshops of the cabinet makers to factories and in part by exploiting new materials and by developing new production techniques for making more furniture in larger production runs.

Plywood could be produced with timber from relatively thin and relatively quick-growing trees and the sheets were light and easy to cut to shape; could be bent to a curve and, when pinned or glued over a wooden frame, plywood could be used for facing large cupboards or simply for the bottoms of drawers. 

A patent was taken out in the 1790s for making a thin boards of wood from layers of veneer that were stuck together with glue but the veneer was cut by hand and relatively rough although strong. In making plywood, then as now, alternate sheets of veneer are turned through ninety degrees so that the natural grain runs first along and then across, so the final board has considerably more strength than a comparable thickness cut from a single piece of timber.

Plywood was not produced on an industrial scale until the 1860s and the word plywood is recorded first in print in the United States in 1917. 

Thonet in Vienna in the second half of the 19th century made light-weight chairs with steam-bent frames that had seats with either woven cane or just a simple round piece of plywood that dropped into a rebate in the frame that formed the seat. Front legs and back posts were bolted to the seat frame and a second steam-bent hoop of wood was fixed just below the seat, instead of stretchers, to hold the legs vertical and again this was bolted or screwed in place. By using screws or bolts - rather than traditional mortice-and-tenon joins as a cabinetmaker would - the chairs could be shipped as separate parts and then assembled on delivery by someone with just basic skills.

By the late 1930s and through the war - through the 1940s - good timber for making furniture was expensive and not readily available so plywood was used, with a light frame, particularly for wardrobes or cupboards. In England this was often referred to as utility furniture.

From the 1920s furniture makers began to cut and bend plywood into more complicated and curved shapes. It was used in the construction of aeroplanes and - before glass fibre and plastics were developed -  for the bodywork of cars and marine plywood, using water resistant glue to bond the layers, was used to build boats.* If the glued layers are held under pressure in a shaped former as they dry, then the piece retains that curve or shape after it is removed from the former.

In Finland, Alvar Alto designed furniture in the late 1920s and early 1930s where a plywood seat and back in a single piece was bent into an elaborate and sinuous curve and in the United States, in the early 1940s, Charles and Ray Eames designed the first chairs where plywood was curved in two planes to form a complex shell.

 

note:

 * I was taught to sail in a small dinghy - a Mirror - made in the school workshops from a kit with parts in marine plywood stitched together with wire and with the joins covered with tape. They were designed in 1962 with Barry Bucknell - a TV DIY expert. Over 70,000 were made and many raced. Bucknell lived in St Mawes - a beautiful fishing village in Cornwall - with his house looking over the beach so I guess that was where the link between sailing and TV DIY could be found. I'm not sure that design is exactly the right word as out on open water it felt a bit like being in a floating wardrobe. The dingy took its name from the British daily newspaper although I can't remember why … presumably they published the patterns and working drawings. The only excuse for including a footnote on Bucknell in a blog about Scandinavian design is that in his TV series he showed people how to do things like disguise an old door that had sunk panels by covering it with sheets of plywood - or worse with hardboard - to create a clean Scandinavian look …… on the cheap. At it's peak, his weekly TV show had 7 million regular viewers so the sort of numbers that style bloggers now dream about.

 

why so many posts here recently about chairs?

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the Danish chair - an international affair - at Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen

 

 

Generally, design blogs are about the latest and the newest and too often yesterday's post is old news … so even if there are categories and tags on a site there is often little reason for clicking or swiping back through past posts.

But there is now a lot of information and there are a lot of photographs on this site so is it possible to make stronger and clearer links to pull some of this together so it is accessible so is it possible to have a better structure on the site for slotting in future posts?

And its not just about linking information but thinking about how to present more information and more photographs than are published on a typical blog. 

On-line sites have a phenomenal advantage over printed books because it's possible, in one place, to provide different levels of information, deeper within the site or just a link away, so there can be a lot more material for wider context or to explore a subject in greater depth with extra information or additional images that put a design into its right place in local or social history or into the context of work by other designers or in the specific context of a designer's total work. 

So it's not just the what but the when and the how and the why that is important.

Nor is it always easy to get access to works to take photographs for a blog. Do a Google search for a well-known piece of furniture - say the Peacock Chair by Hans Wegner - and there will usually be two pages of roughly the same view and they are often either publicity images from the manufacturer or from a magazine or they are an image more like a quick holiday-snap and rarely are there any meaningful details. There are exceptions of course … sites with amazing photos … but not many.

Spending a lot of time at Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen to look, really look, at the display of their collection of modern chairs, it was clear immediately that this is an amazing resource. The chairs are raised up off the floor but can be examined close up and are well lit against a neutral background. The arrangement of the display shows just how many types and forms of chair there are and you can see, through the 20th century, how architects and designers were trying out ideas or see how they were inspired by the possibilities of a new material or a new technique of production

The museum typography is also important because it gives a framework for the subject and it prompts analysis …. it's absolutely fine to stand in front of a piece of furniture and say that's nice - I like that - or to say I really don't like that - and then move on but once you start asking why you like it or why it is good or bad or why it is interesting or why it is weirdly unusual or why, curiously, it reminds you of something else, then you should be able to find out more.

So, as an experiment, there has been a bit of a blitz here to look at a selection of the chairs but in more detail and with more photographs than on most blogs and to experiment a bit with ways of presenting the information, images and observations.

There is a new time line or chronological list for one obvious way to index the information and photographs. 

Of course a time line is not the only way or even always the best way to arrange different objects but the easiest way as long as you put that piece in that year in a wider context: it is not enough to know which year which designer designed which piece of furniture but was this a young designer at the start of their career or someone well experienced but trying something new or someone stuck in a rut and producing the nth version of the same thing in as many years?

These are chairs that come from the classic period of Danish design or were designed in the preliminary stages … so chairs that mark important stages that lead to the designs of the 1950s and 1960s.

From here, the plan is to look at more furniture in more detail - more chairs, more recent chairs - and to talk to designers and manufacturers about how and why and when a design came about and to look at other types of furniture in similar detail.