Chair No. 14 is a constant in our lives. Get lost, and you’ll see in most countries on the planet an arrangement of 6 pieces of bent beech and some caning, a few nuts and some screws - that is recognisable to most of us. We expect it to be there in fact. Trace the development of this arrangement and it plays out like a real-time-strategy video game. You see the long chain of growth and fixation from one person. A chairmaker who starts out in a small workshop replicating existing chair designs for a business partner. They think to save time and money by eliminating the carving and veneering, making the legs and back from a single bend of a strip of wood. Receiving a large commission for a cafe (about 400 chairs) they earn enough to purchase a glue factory, and later, a factory in the woods near the source of their timber. Next thing, it's 1848 and there’s an uprising in neighbouring lands! Hiring a new proletariat workforce will further reduce labor costs. This also provided time to exhibit a now flat-packable chair all over the continent and eventually world, selling 40 million units before even reaching the 20th century. Player in this game, Michael Thonet.
The demonstration and the determination from Thonet to bend wood, economise, innovate, and manipulate a material to such an extent is still unmatched. It wasn’t for another hundred years that any Modernist even thought to step in and take a look at bending wood for the sake of reductionism and economy. Partial to his success, oddly, is that we barely notice the chair anymore. As I said, we expect it to be there.
-Abel Sloane