CHAIR CONVERSATIONS

I have been talking a lot about chairs lately, and the following interesting ideas have come up in conversation. I would like to preface this statement by saying these ideas are not my own; a small adoption in the hopes of good upbringing.

- I asked a fellow student about the tension between the singularity in authorship of design, and the creation of a universal type that would then be infinitely reproduced and universally applied to any situation. (relating to stephanie's previous comment about Bauhaus industrial design). The student agreed that there does seem to be a kind of disjunction between these two ideas -- maybe partially due to the fact that Bauhaus evolved out of an arts and crafts era (craftsman creating singular, unique products) yet wanted to embrace new production methods and utopian ideals of it's time (universalism) -- but that maybe this tension was productive.

- productive is an interesting word. Productive how? It certainly created a standard for most industrial design that we see today. It affectively created a more readily available type that could then be used as an agent for style and of course, taste. Distinction. But if you don't have this, if you cannot relegate a spatial situation to one type or another (as is the case with the Berlin family of chairs, over Paris's army) what does that say about taste? Free play as opposed to militant conformity?