Design: Looking Good Is Not Enough

People now spend more time sitting down than ever before in history. A minor achievement of modern civilization, maybe, but it could explain why producing a chair has been an obligatory rite for ambitious designers of this century. Charles Eames is still famous mainly for his chairs, and the best-known works of today's European café-society designers--Philippe Starck, Enzo Mari--are chairs. Aalto, Breuer and Mies made their marks in the '20s partly by making chairs, and such contemporary architects as Gehry, Meier, Graves, Hollein, Venturi and Ambasz have all felt obliged to design chairs as well as buildings.

For Minneapolis-based Bill Stumpf, 50, chairs, especially office chairs, have been neither a sideline nor a flashy aesthetic afterthought. The Miesian, Eamesian, entirely worthy benchmark Stumpf set for himself years ago was "to make a beautiful chair comfortable." He accomplished that by drawing on more than a decade of careful thought about chairs--not just how they ought to look, but how officeworkers lean and squirm and relax while sitting in them. Stumpf's Ergon (1976) and Equa (1984) are the two most important chairs, surely, of the past quarter-century, handsome, generous and deeply elegant. They are also ubiquitous: the Herman Miller company has sold nearly 2 million Ergons and, in less than two years, some 350,000 Equas.

Back in 1966 at the University of Wisconsin, Stumpf was already examining precisely the way bodies and furniture get along. The new name for his human-factor investigations, ergonomics, was not yet current, but Stumpf made charts, diagrams and, eventually, time-lapse films, becoming a sort of Muybridge of the 9-to-5 realm. In the mid-'70s at Herman Miller, he began turning that research into drawings. The Ergon is a descendant of Eames' designs, an out-of-sequence missing link between the lucid but barebones molded-plywood chair (1946) and the voluptuous, baroque lounge chair (1956) so beloved of big men with dens. The quiet swerves of Ergon's separate seat and back are subtle, like Noguchi stones made soft and purposeful. No earlier American chair had been mounted on a gas-cylinder post, an innovation that finally buffered the shock for sitters who tend to free-fall rather than descend gently into a desk chair.