The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design [Paperback]

Galen Cranz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 17, 2000

"Engaged in fascinating and useful multidisciplinary research, Cranz is an avatar for body-friendly design. . . . Read [The Chair] and cheer."--Elizabeth Zimmer, Village Voice

Perhaps no other object of our daily environment has had the enduring cultural significance of the ever-present chair, unconsciously yet forcefully shaping the physical and social dimensions of our lives. With over ninety illustrations, this book traces the history of the chair as we know it from its crudest beginnings up through the modern office variety. Drawing on anecdotes, literary references, and famous designs, Galen Cranz documents our ongoing love affair with the chair and how its evolution has been governed not by a quest for comfort or practicality, but by the designation of status.Relating much of the modern era's rampant back pain to an increasingly sedentary lifestyle spent in traditional seating, Cranz goes beyond traditional ergonomic theory to formulate new design principles that challenge the way we think and live. A farsighted and innovative approach to our most intimate habitat, this book offers guidelines that will assist readers in choosing a chair-and designing a lifestyle-that truly suits our bodies. Praise for The Chair:  "[A] concise, multidisciplinary gem."—Publishers Weekly "Cranz is no sedentary historian. The Chair is a call to action."—Jonathan Levi, Los Angeles Times "Galen Cranz has written a provocative book. Pull up a comfortable chair-if you can find one-and read it."—Witold Rybczynski 90 illustrations

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The oldest surviving chair comes from the tomb of King Tut. "Roman chairs were rare, decorative items of luxury." Chairs themselves represent the West—or the "barbarians"—to cultures that have done without them. Office seating uses shape, fabric and size to make clear which chair belongs to the boss. And current home seating—even the "male" La-Z-Boy—increasingly tries to accommodate women's bodies and tastes. So reports Cranz (The Politics of Park Design), a professor of architecture at the U.C.-Berkeley, in this concise, multidisciplinary gem. Cranz begins by surveying the chair's historical kinds, styles and meanings; then addresses issues of back support, body shape and ergonomics; and ends up in a vigorous, detailed argument against the standard right-angled chair and "chair-desk complex," in favor of "body-conscious design" in an attractively described Ideal Workplace. "Sitting is hard work," Cranz's research reveals; seatmakers should, she says, abandon the common principle of lower-back support; the Alexander Technique of somatic therapy holds lessons for furniture designers; "human beings are not designed to hold any single posture for long periods"; garden-variety office furniture is bad for you; and the famous chairs of Modernism are, in general, even worse. Cranz's clear book—half survey, half polemic—may successively delight, instruct and alarm professors in their endowed chairs, designers at their slanted tables, drivers in drivers' seats, parents with carseats and, of course, the armchair intellectual. 85 photographs and illustrations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Berkeley architecture professor Cranz takes a radical departure from her first book, The Politics of Park Design, in offering up a soundly intellectual perspective on the chair--its history, styles, uses, and evolution. Far from being an object of desire, the four-legged wonder as commonly designed and perceived wreaks havoc on our bodies, making the phrase "comfortable chair" a thoroughly modern oxymoron. In fact, Cranz examines in depth most of our sitting apparatuses--from Breuer's Cresca chair to Norway's Balans--and finds most wanting. Her solution? A five-point checklist, a new philosophical perspective (somatics, the science of body-mind relationships), and a range of novel ways to align and support torsos properly. Provocative yet thoughtful, with more than a kernel of truth. Barbara Jacobs --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (January 17, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393319555
• ISBN-13: 978-0393319552
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #546,819 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating challenge to anyone who sits, February 25, 1999

By 

Jerry Sontag ([e-mail]) (San Francisco, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design (Hardcover)

There are certain subjects that do not seem to lend themselves to serious or interesting scrutiny. I would have said the history of the chair, and its place in society, would have been one of those subjects until reading Professor (and Alexander Teacher) Galen Cranz's new book, The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body and Design.

Professor Cranz takes a look at the history of chairs, their place establishing hierarchical relationships among people, and the various design attempts artists and architects have made at creating chairs. Cranz makes clear in her book that in chair design often the "emphasis is on materials-plastic, metal, and wood in varied applications-rather than on the effect of the chair and its structure upon the body and its structure." The chair becomes an object, an everyday sculpture, that oftentimes disregards the fact that it is being used in particular ways for particular purposes, with substantial impact on the individual who sits in the chair.

In recent history, an increasing focus has been made on the way chairs affect our use. For anyone interested in the way we use ourselves, the portion of the book that examines the ergonomic attempts to create a more body-friendly chair reads like a dark comedy, as various attempts are made to address one part of the body, without adequately considering another part. Cranz takes us through this process and helps us see the misconceptions that many designers have built into their chairs. One of the first, and biggest, problems facing designers is figuring out how to determine what would make a chair that facilitated ease and comfort. Comfort is a particularly vexing concept, for reasons obvious to any Alexander teacher, since the old familiar habitual patterns are going to tend to feel comfortable, at least in the short term. Cranz suggests that the various attempts at measuring comfort, including the use of "Electromyogram tests... stresses along the spine, using needles in the discs or pressure-sensitive pills" have been unsuccessful in measuring a meaningful change in comfort level for the person sitting.

Another refreshing aspect of the book is the radical notion put forward by a new breed of ergonomic designers that chair design specifically, and workplace design in general, should not be restricted by "traditional cultural expectations. They want to change traditional workplace design. For them, the beginning and end of design should be the body."

Cranz gives a short history of the Alexander Technique in her book, but only references the Technique when it is relevant to the general design questions at hand. The Technique is presented as a unique approach that can help inform chair design, without proselytizing about the specific benefits of the Technique itself. The Technique has simply become, in effect, part of the relevant literature on design issues.

In one section of the book, Cranz talks about how one's conception of gravity will change one's design ideas: "If a designer thinks gravity is the enemy, he/she will design chairs like bags to hold our collapsed structures. But if the designer believes that gravity is useful to us, the sitting surface can function more like a platform so that the structure of forces and counterforces helps us spring into the body's natural volume-as opposed to being stacked from the bottom up like a wall or collapsed into a heap." She goes on to say that "The most wide-ranging philosophical insight from the Alexander Technique and the somatic perspective generally is that human beings are designed for movement, and that more important than any single given posture is the quality of our movement, our overall coordination."

Cranz questions the traditional notions of lumbar support, of chair backs that do not continue high enough to support the shoulders and head, and of the various other design decisions that have interfered with a more natural use of the body. In the last sections of the book, Cranz lays out her recommendations for a better chair, ("a forward-tilt seat, firm-textured surface, a flat uncontoured seat, butt space between seat and backrest,") as well as examining some of the more unconventional approaches that have been taken to try to address the complex challenges of more intelligent and humane chair design.

Cranz has successfully turned a topic that could easily have been relegated to the back shelves of university libraries into a fascinating account of what chairs have been, done and stood for over the centuries, and what they can become in the future.

53 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars My review for the Human Factors & Ergonomics Society magazine Ergonomics in Design, March 24, 2004

By 

Rani Lueder (http://humanics-es.com) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design (Paperback)

Galen Cranz on "The Chair"
Reviewed by Rani Lueder, CPE

This book is about seating and sitting. Having once spent my vacation scouring Europe's museums for the earliest representation of a chair (earliest I could find was 1570), I looked forward to opening its covers.

Dr. Cranz teaches Environmental Design at the UC Berkeley Architecture Dept. Not surprisingly, she cuts a wide swath on seating, spanning history, sociology, industrial design, architecture, ergonomics, and holistic body/mind approaches - particularly the Alexander technique.

Parts of her book are engrossing. In particular, her historical perspective of how chair design has evolved historically [if it is accurate] may be unmatched. Her discussion of the holistic aspects of posture is also interesting.

That said, this book is NOT noteworthy for its review of the ergonomics research on sitting postures and seating. Much of it is plain hogwash.

Throughout the book she refers to us as "ergonomicists" [should be "ergonomists"] and claims the discipline is derived from the Greek "ergon" and "omics" [should be "nomos" (laws)].

It is sometimes painful to read her sweeping generalizations. Dr. Cranz writes that ergonomic researchers "have concluded that the workstation should be an indication of the worker's status" (p. 55) . . . and "status differences have to be maintained, ergonomicists say" (p. 56), citing as evidence two office planning guides written by and for architects that fail to mention ergonomics or ergonomists anywhere in the books.

She misrepresents research, as when she castigates Dr. Etienne Grandjean's "poor reasoning" in Fitting the Task to the Man, writing "Amazingly, Grandjean starts with the slump as a goal" (p. 108). Drs. Grandjean et al's research actually documented computer users' self-selected postures. These researchers reported that rather than sitting upright, the computer users they observed tended to recline somewhat.

She cites findings from a small laboratory study by Drs. Bendix et al. (12 subjects for 2 hours in 3 back support conditions) as proof that lumbar supports on chair backrests are unequivocally unnecessary (p. 109) - but not the many studies that contradict. Minor assertions are meticulously cited, but questionable conclusions often are not sourced.

If you are looking for a thorough analysis of seated posture, this is not the book for you. It provides a unique and multidisciplinary perspective on the context of seating, but - please - take her review of the ergonomics research on sitting postures and seating design with a heavy dose of salt.

______


Followup you might be interested in Dr. Jenny Pynt's far superior book on the topic, at this link.

www.amazon.com/History-Seating-3000-2000-Aesthetics/dp/1604977183


Rani Lueder, CPE has consulted in occupational and product design ergonomics for over 25 years. Her activities on seating include co-organizing the Second International Conference on Sitting Posture, held in Tokyo. Her second edited book "Hard Facts" is about sitting postures and seating (Taylor & Francis). She served on the seating subcommittee for the American National Standard ANSI BSR/HFES 100. She consulted in the research and design of over 350 lines of seating. Her newest edited book is "Ergonomics for Children: Designing products & places for toddlers to teens" (2007, Taylor & Francis).

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful read about an unexpected subject., March 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design (Hardcover)

I never thought I'd be reading a book about chairs! But this book is well worthwhile for anyone who has ever complained about uncomfortable chairs - at work, at home, at the airport etc. The book gives you quite a bit of practical information. I was struck by the references to the Alexander Technique (the author is an Alexander Technique teacher as well as being a university professor) and so I did a little researsch on that topic. There are quite a few good books available and a very comprehensive web site at alexandertechnique.com