Chair Anatomy: Design and Construction dissects nearly sixty chairs from the last 160 years of modern design, using photographs and technical illustrations to expose the structural logic, material choices, and constructional decisions that make each piece work.
About This Book
A chair is, as James Orrom puts it, architecture in miniature — and this book treats it accordingly. Rather than surveying chair design at a distance, Chair Anatomy reduces each piece to its constituent parts: the joint details, the material properties, the structural strategies that allow a design to be elegant, load-bearing, and producible at scale. It is a book about how things are made and why those decisions matter — essential reading for furniture designers, industrial designers, and architects with a serious interest in the relationship between form and fabrication. This revised and expanded edition adds five chairs representing new technological, constructional, and aesthetic solutions.
Key Features
- 256 pages of photographs and technical illustrations analysing the construction details of nearly sixty chairs
- Author: James Orrom
- Notable inclusions: Hemp Chair by Werner Aisslinger (2011), Bruto by Konrad Lohöfener (2018), and Chubby by Dirk van der Kooij (2012)
- Published by Thames & Hudson Australia, 2012
What You'll Discover
- How structural components are designed and produced to fit together — and what that means for the integrity and economy of a final design
- Why material selection is inseparable from aesthetic outcome: how a given material imparts a specific quality, texture, or performance characteristic
- The biographical and professional backgrounds of the designers behind each chair, contextualising the creative decisions within their broader practice
- How new technologies and fabrication methods — as seen in the five added chairs — continue to expand what chair design can achieve structurally and aesthetically
About the Author
James Orrom is the author of Chair Anatomy: Design and Construction. Further biographical details are not provided in the source material.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 256
- Dimensions: 21.08 x 25.65 x 2.54 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780500297025
- Publisher: Thames & Hudson Australia
- Publication Date: 2012
Perfect For: Furniture designers, industrial designers, architecture students, and design researchers interested in the technical and material logic underlying modern chair design.