The Smallest Room
A chair is the smallest piece of architecture a person ever occupies. The seat at knee height. The back that catches you where you tire. Those measurements have barely moved in a century and designers have endless answers.
Basic.Space brought fifty of those answers to Christie's Beverly Hills for one week. A Mies cantilever. An Eames LCW in the calfskin edition made for a Christie's sale in 2002. A Philippe Hiquily brass chair lent by Kelly Wearstler. Beside them chairs made in Los Angeles this year. A Joseph Santiago-Dieppa piece built from chains of steel spheres. A translucent blue armchair made of balloons dipped in resin. A chair welded from vintage forks.
Seen together they stopped being furniture. They became a condensed history of how we have imagined the human body in space.
The building
Christie's Beverly Hills was designed by Kulapat Yantrasast's practice wHY. Its pearlescent aluminum facade draws its language from Josef Hoffmann. He trained as an architect under Otto Wagner in Vienna in the 1890s. He co-founded the Wiener Werkstätte in 1903 with the idea that a building and its contents should be designed as one complete thing.
Josef Hoffman chairs and his buildings came from the same thinking. Fifty chairs spent a week behind a facade that came from a man who never separated the two.
Josef Hoffman, 1916,
Obsessing Over
Every one of those forks has been in somebody’s mouth. Birthday cake, burnt Tuesday pasta, a late-night bite over the sink. Now they’re welded together and you’re sitting on the lot of it. Funny that they used to carry your dinner and now they carry you.
The Fork Chair by CARVINGBLOCK, Emory Hall, and Emma Pryde