What Is the History of Modern Chair Design?

by Travis Nagle

Let's face it. Chairs aren't just for sitting. In fact, most people select chairs for their homes for a variety of reasons, including the aesthetic appeal and ergonomic qualities they provide. However, many people fail to appreciate just how much chair design has changed over the last century.

So where exactly do these modern chair designs come from? Here is a brief history of modern chairs and the American and international designers that made the movement possible.

Prior to the late 19th century, the value of furniture had been based on the amount of time that an artisan spent on the piece and how ornate it was. However, as new technologies emerged and industrial manufacturing methods began to make furniture production cheaper and easier, furniture design began to change. As a result, modern furniture designers began to design furniture that was intended to reach the masses, rather than creating furniture solely for the elite.

With the advent of modern furniture also arose the concept of creating pieces for functional, practical reasons, a concept that was heavily influenced by the simplicity of Japanese design and the spread of Japonism across Europe.

With this change in focus, modern furniture designs were created to be more practical with regard to style and color choices. The materials used to design furniture also began to evolve with more pieces using plastics, steel, molded plywood, and glass in order to lighten the footprint of the furniture, which was actually a working philosophy of the Deutscher Werkbund school.

At the same time, the Bauhaus school emerged and became highly influential as the members of Bauhaus worked to combine intellectual, practical, commercial, and aesthetic concerns through art and technology in furniture design and all other aspects.

As all of these influences came together, many furniture designers made significant contributions to the development of modern furniture, especially the following designers whose works are highly recognizable even today.

Le Corbusier (1887-1965)

Swiss-French architect, urban planner, writer and furniture designer, Le Corbusier, who is credited as one of the pioneers of modern architecture, his architectural works span Europe.

Japan, India, and North and South America. However, these projects have faced significant criticisms for being too authoritarian in their designs. Despite this, his work as a furniture designer remains highly recognizable today as the creator of the revolutionary LC4 Chaise, a chaise lounge.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe creator of the Barcelona Chair and Ottoman is recognized as a leader of the German modern movement. Mies, also served as the Vice President of the Deutsher Werkbund and the Director of the Bauhaus from 1930 until its closing. The Bauhaus closed in 1933 as a result of pressure from the Nazi regime. Mies then immigrated to the United States in 1938.

After forming an architecture practice based in Chicago, he designed the Illinois Institute of Technology. He later met Florence Knoll to whom he granted exclusive rights to produce his furniture, including the Brno chair, MR series, and Barcelona collection. Replica versions of Mies' furniture are still being produced by Knoll even today.

Charles & Ray Eames (Charles, 1907-1978; Ray, 1912-1988)

The Eames were a husband and wife team of American furniture designers who became recognized for the Eames chair. Combined bent plywood, along with molded fiberglass, the pair created some of the 20th century's most influential modern furniture designs. These chairs remain highly prized even today for their sleek looks combined with simple functionality.

Eero Saarinen (1910-1961)

Eero Saarinen, a Finnish architect and furniture designer, is most well-known as the designer the Tulip chairs and tables and the Womb Chair. Saarinen was also a friend of Charles Eames and Florence Knoll, two individuals whom he grew close with after meeting them at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Saarinen pushed the boundaries of modern furniture at the time by incorporating curvilinear forms which had not been seen previously in the work of the furniture designers that came before him. His other most well-known projects include Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. and The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri.

Isamu Nogchi (1904–1988)

Isamu Nogchi was a Japanese-American sculptor and architect. After coming to New York in the 1930's, he began to make a name for himself with large public sculptures. His famous furniture designs include the Noguchi Free Form Sofa and Ottoman, which he developed while working for Herman Miller beginning in 1947. Throughout his life, he retained a deep connection to Japanese culture which helped to fuel his diverse and eclectic work.

Arne Jacobsen (1902–1971)

Jacobsen was a Danish architect and designer who got his start as a mason. He later studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, where he won a silver medal for a chair he designed at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs in Paris.

He was the one of the first to introduce modernist ideas to Demark, helping to create the industrial furniture that influences Scandinavian design even today. His most well-known furniture designs are the Swan and Egg Chairs. His architectural works include the SAS Air Terminal and Royal Hotel Copenhagen.

George Nelson (1908-1986)

George Nelson, an American industrial designer, was the director of design at Herman Miller for nearly 30 years from 1945 to 1972. While there he was responsible for recruiting other well-known designers, including Isamu Noguchi and Charles Eames. He also designed a number of his own furniture items for which he is still widely recognized for, such as the Coconut Chair and Marshmallow Sofa. As an early environmentalist, his goal as a designer was “to do much more with much less.”

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The Industrial Revolution Gave Birth To Office Chairs

Before the nineteenth century, most of the global workforce was employed in agrarian labor—an “office chair” was only relevant for the wealthy, government officials and academics. In fact, Charles Darwin is the earliest known adopter of a proto-office chair, grafting wheels onto a normal chair in the 1840s so he could swivel between specimens. It goes without saying that this was a fairly uncommon use case.

Then came the railroad, the advent of manufacturing, and the Industrial Revolution. As the traditional model of labor was upended, more administrative workers were needed for logistical coordination and bookkeeping, and the concept of general and administrative workers was born. Businesses empowered by rail access in scaling and expanding to new markets employed more and more people—creating a cadre of middle managers.

This was the first time in history that productivity accrued on a mass scale from people sitting indoors. As white collar workers became a crucial economic resource for the first time, their bosses began to recognize the value of making them comfortable.

Mid-1800s: Victorian Design

Enter the first mass production office chair: the Centripetal Office Chair, designed by the inventor Thomas Warren and launched by the American Chair Company in 1851 at the Great Exhibition in London. The example depicted to the right now sits in the Brooklyn Museum.

It looks dated, but the chair was surprisingly functional by today’s standards. Made of cast iron and upholstered in velvet, the chair’s standard features included full tilt movement enabled by four large springs concealed in the frame, a revolving seat, and casters for movement.

The chair sold poorly outside the United States, because the Victorian norms prevailing in the Anglophone world at the time viewed comfortable seating as immoral. The Centripetal Chair was too ergonomic for its time.

But Victorian propriety was hardly a lasting bulwark against the rising tide of a manufacturing / service economy. As the Industrial Revolution culminated, the growing tide of office workers took notice; the most popular attraction during the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia was the Office Furniture Exhibit. Meanwhile, specialty chairs for barbers and dentists had started to introduce the components and materials that would power the modern office chair.

Early 1900s: Architectural Design

By the early twentieth century, the desk job was a staple function in the worldwide economy, and industrial designers had risen to the occasion. But they didn’t focus on comfort. The question at stake was architectural alignment with the rest of the space.

Frank Lloyd Wright designed the office chair on the right to accompany the Larkin Building, an office building he designed in 1904. The chair was lauded for its innovative height adjustment mechanism, but lacked—to say the least—the human-centered design features that we take for granted today. He made an even less comfortable, three-legged version called the “suicide chair,” intended for the largely female secretarial staff.

Although the Victorian era had faded, comfort was still linked closely with laziness in the minds of managers, and design decisions tended to be informed by cost and congruence with the prevailing architectural style.

Mid 1900s: Modern Design

Office chairs evolved into a recognizable form after World War II. This was no accident: ergonomic research played a tremendous role in the design of instruments of war, like tanks and plane cockpits, as well as the factories that produced them.

Combined with post-war industrialization and the emergence of the United States as a full-fledged manufacturing and services economy, the office chair had renewed purpose and a huge body of declassified military research waiting to inspire new designs.

The Aluminum Group Chair by famed designers Ray and Charles Eames features sleek lines, metal spokes and plastic casters. Look familiar? Many office chairs of this era look like—and in some cases, are—the same chairs we might sit on today.

But aesthetics, not ergonomics, still drove the design of chairs. The mid-century modern aesthetic produced beautiful furniture for the growing mass of office workers, and proved popular enough to produce plenty of business for chiropractors and orthopedic surgeons.

1970s until today: Ergonomic Design

The era of the ergonomic office chair began in earnest in the 1970s. Several catalysts played a role in the popularization of ergonomic design. Notable among these were series of books—particularly Humanscale, by the designer Niels Diffrient—that popularized the ergonomics findings of military and industrial researchers, and made them accessible to the design community at large.

Advanced materials spilled over from Cold War and Space Age research, and an American surgeon George Phalen began spreading the word about a mysterious condition afflicting office workers called carpal tunnel syndrome. In 1970, President Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration Act (OSHA) into law, ensuring that companies which failed to provide a safe work environment would be penalized.

These factors culminated in the Ergon Chair, designed by William Stumpf and released in 1976. Although it lacked the configurability of modern chairs, it used molded foam that conformed to our natural sitting position—a landmark in ergonomic design. Later designs like the popular Aeron chair took these principles and carried them forward, applying advanced materials like breathable mesh and 3D aided-design.

The end result of this process are modern office chairs, the best of which mold to our needs in ways that would be hard to imagine for Thomas Warren or Frank Lloyd Wright.

Future of the Office Chair

The office chairs we interact with every day—and sometimes take for granted—are the culmination of a century-long process shaped by design trends and socioeconomic factors alike. The results have been nothing short of spectacular. As design objects, the best office chairs on the market today have reached a pinnacle of aesthetic and ergonomic excellence.

If that’s true, what’s next for the office chair? Although research is still ongoing, preliminary studies have begun to show that most office workers should sit less and stand more. The office chair of the future may be lighter and more modular to account for the fact that it will be used in specific, task-oriented ways.

But chairs will always be part of our workplace experience. The fundamental problems with the ergonomic office chair today are accessibility and flexibility, not design. With prices rising to the four-figure range for premium chairs, the best chairs are largely inaccessible to the mass market of knowledge workers.

And the way we procure office chairs today—buy it once, stuck with it forever—doesn’t align with the reality of a workforce populated in greater numbers by freelancers, remote workers and high-growth companies with need that change fast.

The most impactful design innovation to come may be the combination of time-tested design with a fundamental restructuring in the way office chairs are bought and sold, so more workers can take advantage of quality materials, ergonomic best practices and beautiful design. Until then, take a moment to lean back in your chair and acknowledge our debt of gratitude to the designers that helped us sit the way we do—comfortable, in style, and ready to work.