Throughout history, creating chairs has always provided the occasion for furthering formal and structural experimentation, critical discourse and play in design practice. Both one of most frivolous as well as technically demanding design tasks, designing a chair appears to be a compulsory exercise and a necessary step in any designer’s career. Due to its simplicity and straightforwardness of use, as well as its established visual code and centuries old history, looking at a chair design can often seem like reading Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style”, where the content (in this case, the function) remains unvaried yet the meaning subtly changes with each formal perpetration.
Fin de Siècle, a recently inaugurated exhibition on show at the Swiss Institute in New York, approaches chair design with a similar spirit. Drawing from Eugene Ionesco’s 1952 absurdist play “The Chairs”, the exhibition is designed to communicate the objects’ inherent narrative. “In ‘The Chairs’, an elderly couple recounts the demise of civilization to a stage full of empty chairs. Absent of any sitters, the audience is left to imagine the invisible figures that the increasingly incoherent Old Man and Old Woman address. In Fin de Siècle, the chairs themselves speak asynchronously, cast as characters and imbued with life. Directed into small vignettes of imagined conversations and actions that transcend periods and design movements, their dialogue echoes the modernist promise fading away.”
From mass produced objects to experiments in utopian design, Fin de Siècle includes projects by some of the greatest minds in the history of design – Le Corbusier, Alessandro Mendini, Marcel Breuer, Charlotte Perriand, Gaetano Pesce or Andrea Branzi, leaving their designs to narrate the story of design practice, its intricate dynamics, peculiarities and contradictions. Fin de Siècle, curated by Andreas Angelidakis, is the inaugural edition of the Swiss Institute’s Annual Design Series, and will remain on show until the 23rd of November 2014.
