I’m going to lose it. Look at this:

Chairs, in museums, caged behind ropes and standing lines, displayed as pieces of art. Among the petty things I care about, this perhaps makes me the most angry. If you don’t care about this yet, and you will, then bear with me as I scream this question from the rafters: why do they keep putting stuff I can’t sit on in museums? I’m disgusted.

The crux of the issue is simple. You cannot display a chair in a museum because the second you do, it stops being a chair. A chair is an object defined by action. If you cannot sit, it cannot be a chair. If the chair is durable and wide, that is part of the chair. If it is uncomfortable, that is part of the chair. And if the chair breaks after just one person sits in it, then that is part of the chair as well. When a chair is divorced from the context of its being, when you remove the mechanism that demands its existence – it stops being a chair and becomes a crude and confusing piece of abstract visual art. If a museum “displayed” a painting that you could only perceive by listening to the artist throw tomatoes at it from behind a curtain would you call it a painting? It would certainly be interesting; it would probably even be art, but would it be a painting? I don’t think so. Any designer who has had the pleasure of sitting down on something in their lives (as I imagine the vast majority have) should understand this: a seat should never be put behind bars. Function is a part of form and designing a piece of seating for a museum fundamentally denies its purpose.

It isn’t hard to fix the problem either. Most chairs are not particularly hard to build, even those that use premium materials can be adequately replicated (albeit at a lesser quality) with imitation leathers and silks. Modern furniture with particular design value often falls into this category. If it is a historical piece then it’s even easier, wood is more readily available than ever before and we certainly didn’t lose the technology to make dovetails. In these cases, a newer representation of a historical artifact would actually add to the exhibit. I promise you the Vikings did not sit in the crusty, splintered relic laid out in the exhibit, at least not in the state it is presented. “Where would we put it?” – In the exhibit, people already need seating for accessibility reasons, if your museum doesn’t have seats already then you have much bigger problems. Make a second chair. It is only through laziness that we have been forced to understand touch as a visual medium.

I have already stated my case enough to make the word chair lose all meaning. You might agree with me and you might even care, I hope you do. You might only care a little bit; I want you to care a lot. If you’re still on the fence then maybe gaining a greater appreciation for the beauty and complexity of seating could help. I think the crux of the issue here lies in the difficulty of actually designing a chair. 

If you’ve gone through your entire life, somehow managing to never feel uncomfortable in a chair, then I envy you, but have you ever tried to design a chair? Have you ever even tried to build one? It is impossible to do right. Sure, if you design in a world composed solely of 5’10”, able-bodied men, you might be able to nail down a solution. But unless you are designing crash test dummies or stocking grocery shelves, those kinds of assumptions just don’t fly in the real world. It is so incredibly difficult. People do not come in standard heights or widths, they are not all able to sit down or stand back up, and the “irregular” things that can be true of some people’s spines would shock you. What if a child or elderly person needs to sit? This is all before taking into account the environment of the object or the context of its use. The human body is beautiful, complicated, and infuriating. Designing a chair means making a fundamental piece of human architecture public; to analyze such a thing you must take into account the whole disturbed majesty of the human experience. You cannot do this solely with your eyes. You must sit in the chair. 

Here is a photo that I took at the Museum of Islamic Science in Istanbul. It is a row of imitation Wassily chairs just sitting in the lobby. This is a chair that could be in a museum but to enjoy it here is free. 

If you are an artist about to send your cool new chair to a museum or a historian setting up an antique bench for display, maybe just put in the effort to make a second one.