Comfort and ergonomics

"The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort."  Confucius

I picked up my planed and width-cut beech from Peter's shop on Friday afternoon and it looks great. Not much time for any real carpentry this past weekend and, as usual, the upcoming work week will probably keep me at bay. But while I'm waiting for some quality time at the table saw, I guess I'll wax on a bit about chair comfort and ergonomics. 

The few people who I've talked to in person thus far in regards to me making copies of Rietveld's 1925 Chair with Spring Seat have all asked "Is it going to be comfortable?" Well, good question! I won't know for sure until I actually build one and sit down in it, I suppose. But I've got an educated guess that it will be. Leading up to choosing this subject to build,  I took careful measurements of just about every chair we have here in the house and compared them with the dimensions outlined in the below two drawings, which I present here courtesy of Wood Magazine and their associated web site.  As the web text there reminds, this is merely a basic set of guidelines and not a precise blueprint for any and all chairs. Dining chairs are going to be fundamentally different than lounge chairs, and so on. But it's a good place to start.

I also found a used copy of a 1997 book titled Chairmaking & Design by Jeff Miller (Taunton Press, ISBN 1-56158-158-5) that is chocked full of good information. Most of what I've picked up there was either previously unknown to me or long forgotten knowledge pertaining to wood shrinkage, joinery techniques and proper grain orientation of the basic components. All in all, it's an excellent overview on the subject and on woodworking in general. Anyone contemplating the construction of any sort of chair should give it a read.

It turns out that the chairs in our household allying closest to the ones matching these hypothetically ideal drawn dimensions and also matching my preliminary dimensional drawings of the 1925 Rietveld chair  - especially when comparing seat and armrest height, back angles, etc. - belong to the rather nondescript metal framed ones that live outside, behind the house on our patio (pictured below, right.) Happily, these rather pedestrian-looking patio chairs are also among the most comfortable ones we own. They're a compromise that function quite nicely as both something you could use to sit at a table while eating a meal and what you might also want to use to casually sit while reading a book . . . probably working slightly more effectively at the latter than the former. Interestingly, though, the upholstery on them is almost nonexistent and, in fact, you hardly miss those cushions when they're removed. They don't look like they would be the most comfortable chairs in the house. But they are.

It should be noted that the most well known Gerrit Rietveld chair - the 1917 Red & Blue - isn't exactly best remembered for being the epitome of comfort in the conventional sense of the word as it is for creating a bold artistic statement, which it certainly did back then and continues to do so even today. In regards to comfort, Rietveld himself was fond of saying "We must remember that 'sit' is a verb, too." Author Paul Overy, further commenting on this in his book, De Stijl, writes "One of the functions of Ritveld's chairs, with their hard seats and backs, is to focus our senses, to make us feel alert and aware. Rietveld was not interested in conventional ideas of comfort (the 19th century armchair that relaxes you so much that you spill your coffee or fall asleep over your book.) He wished to keep the sitter physically and mentally 'toned up'." Hmmm . . .

That said, the Red & Blue (an early version, shown in photo, below, with the designer/builder seated upon it while enjoying a smoke along with his young disciples standing behind him,) with its sloped back Adirondack-like proportions, isn't exactly a medieval torture device either. Yet the lack of opulent upholstered padding and the minimalist stick frame superstructure would probably be off-putting to today's typical American consumer, waltzing through the aisles of the local La-Z-Boy outlet in pursuit of a padded recliner to plonk in front of the widescreen HDTV.

Incidentally, it's worth noting that the Lay-Z-Boy recliner we have in the back room of our house rated rather low in my chair comfort survey. Regardless of seating position selected, it has a nasty tendency to drain the blood out of ones wrists due to the overly high mounted and rearward sloping armrests and, despite all that extra stuffing - or perhaps because of it - lower back support is seriously lacking. Hmmm, indeed. Score one for the Dutch Neoplastisists.