The more organized of us are most likely already drumming up ideas for holiday gifts for loved ones…but perhaps the majority of us haven’t even begun to do so. It is, after all, just a few days past Halloween.
Now that we are past jack-o-lanterns and scary movies and socially distanced trick-or-treating, in your holiday gift-giving endeavors, we invite you to consider a new illustrated book we recently had the pleasure of viewing.
Debuting just a few weeks ago, Chairpedia is an illustrated encyclopedic book that quite simply tells the story, and the history, of the chair.
Directed and made by Ramón Úbeda for Andreu World, the work is a compilation of anecdotes, stories, and facts around the chair, written by 20 design, architecture and art historians who know its stories well: María José Balcells, Santi Barjau, Isabel Campi, Guillem Celada, Daniel Cid, Isabel Del Río, Ana Domínguez, José María Faerna, Albert Fuster, Marisa García Vergara, Daniel Giralt-Miracle, Rosina Gómez-Baeza, Pilar Mellado, Oriol Pibernat, Mónica Piera, Patricio Sáiz, Carmen Sevilla y Rosalía Torrent.
In 2016, Andreu World launched its Chairpedia initiative, whereby the company began compiling chair-related texts by writers and historians “in an attempt to promote and publicize the history and culture of the chair,” notes the book’s accompanying brochure. “An open-ended project to be continued in the future, the first installment has been materialized in this book published by La Fabrica to mark the company’s 65th anniversary.”
Chairpedia is divided into 12 chapters: Popular Culture, Design Classics, Spanish Classics, Archetypes, Seats of Power, Changing the World, Movie Designs, This Is Also a Chair, Artists’ Chair, Unseated Stories, Chairs and Letters, and Chairness.
From the project director Ramón Úbeda’s notes:
“The Chairpedia is a collection of stories about chairs that began with the sedative and sedentary tales penned by writer Mauricio Wiesenthal for the book Historias para leer sentado, published by Andreu World as non-commercial edition in 2016. In his texts, we learned that César Ritz instructed his hotel decorators to make the furniture small so the rooms would look bigger, and that Rilke always wrote standing up and only sat down to read. We also discovered curious facts and anecdotes like the one about Justice Du Hellain, who asked to be buried with his chair, and others that made us eager to know more and ultimately inspired this new undertaking: a compilation of histories and stories to help spread ‘chair culture’ in a more entertaining and less academic way.”
“Every chair has a story to tell, and there’s room for all of them here – even those in which design doesn’t play a fundamental role. There are one hundred and one chairs, but there might have been many more. If we could, we would have included a thousand and one chairs in this remarkable encyclopedic work. There is a lot to be said about the chair, as arguably the most iconic piece in the history of furniture, and that history can be told as precisely and factually as any other, but we decided to combine precision with an open, multifaceted approach by inviting a variety of experts – all qualified design, architecture, or art historians – from different generations and geographical locations to help us tell it. We enlisted their aid, not out of any desire to pontificate on the subject, but because we wanted to learn from the best and share that knowledge with readers.”
“The contents are divided into chapters whose titles offer another clue as to the nature of this publication. The selection of stories is entirely subjective: we chose these, but they could just as easily have been others, because there’s no shortage of options. Using illustrations instead of photographs to accompany these texts was also a deliberate choice and a herculean undertaking for Antonio Solaz, who cleverly avoided monotony by multiplying his range of creative media and methods. We gave him complete freedom to interpret the stories as he saw fit, trusting that the result would be a genuine illustrated book in which form follows function, just as the Bauhausians said good chairs should do – the same kind of chairs Andreu World has been making for the past 65 years. The story of this firm is the last in the book, but it could just as easily have been the first.”
The book features 101 illustrations, 21 portraits, and 245 chair drawings created by Andreu World’s own Antonio Solaz, “using different styles and graphic resources” – and these gorgeous, punchy illustrations are great fun to walk through.
As a text, it is printed in full color and has a flexibound format, offering the hand something more substantial than a paperback, though less mass than a typical coffee table book.
The book’s inside jacket perfectly captures the spirit of its cause:
“This book narrates our shared history while surveying the history of some of the world’s most famous chairs, from the most avant-garde designs to the most modest. Page after page reveals how important chairs have been in every aspect of our lives, in an exercise in humility and gratitude: we’ve become so used to them that often we hardly even notice their presence, but every chair is a genuine luxury, an object of tremendous value not only because of its price or exclusivity, but because it is woven into the fabric of our lives in more ways than we can imagine. Welcome, reader, to this Chairpedia, and welcome to chairness, to the sweet sensation of having a silent, familiar, necessary companion. For, as Alessandro Mendini said, ‘While the chair works, the man rests.’”
When reading Chairpedia, it genuinely feels like we’re walking through a delightful, well-curated exhibition of chairs at our favorite museum…and since many of our arts and museum outings have been temporarily quashed from our schedules, this book might just be the thing to help fill a cultural void in our year.
