2024.4.14

J39

On April 18th, I had the opportunity to participate in a talk event about chairs at a design school on "Higashikawa Good Chair Day". The project was to select and introduce one chair from the collection of over 1,300 chairs collected by Noritsugu Oda, a world-renowned furniture researcher. Six designers and woodworkers who design chairs in Higashikawa Town talked about the chairs they had chosen.

I chose Børge Mogensen's J39 without hesitation. The chair, commonly known as the People's Chair, was created in 1947 by the Danish FDB (consumer's cooperative) based on the concept of delivering high-quality chairs at a fair price for everyone. When I first visited Copenhagen, Denmark, I saw J39s casually lined up in a cafe near Tivoli Gardens, and when I saw the people of Copenhagen sitting on those chairs, I remember being moved by the fact that they were truly citizen's chairs.

The J39, also known as Shaker chair, is a redesign of the traditional chair of the Shaker people of North America. Mogensen's teacher, Kaare Klint, also redesigned the Shaker chair as a church chair, and the J39 can also be thought of as a redesign of Kaare Klint's chair. Like the Shaker chair, J39 is made up of almost straight lines, but there is a bulge in the spindle that receives the paper cord on the seat, and I think the slight curve gives the overall impression a softer feel compared to the Shaker chair.

Among the Oda Collection designers, Børge Mogensen has always been my role model. I also love Hans Wegner and Finn Juhl, but their free and organic line designs are something I would never be able to model. Mogensen's designs, which consist of straight lines that can be drawn with a ruler and only a few curved lines, give the illusion that I also can do. I can only create designs by thinking about the ratio of the length of straight lines, moving the position of each part, changing the angle, and twisting the shape. However, in reality, it seems almost impossible to create something as beautiful as Mogensen's with just a simple composition of elements...

When selecting chairs for this talk event, I had decided to choose up to a third choice in case my chair overlapped with another participant's. My second choice was Thonet's No.14, and my third choice was Carl Malmsten's Lilla Åland. Thonet No.14 is a chair that represents modern design, and is probably the most produced chair in the world. I'm sure everyone has seen them lined up on terrace seats at cafes in Paris. Lilla Åland is a Windsor chair that was designed with mass production in mind, which is unusual for Malmsten furniture. In the rural village of Capellagården in Sweden, many homes had this chair, and I have fond memories of fixing the spindles on many of these chairs during my stay there.
I chose common people's chairs for all three.

I think the 20th century can be said to be a time when the industrial revolution, democracy, and capitalism changed the chair, which had previously been a symbol of the authority of kings and aristocrats, to become the chair of citizens. Perhaps the biggest story behind modern design was to "deliver good design to as many people as possible." This story has almost been achieved in developed countries, and in terms of quantity, cars, home appliances, smartphones, and everyday tools have become available to almost everyone. I think that more furniture has already been produced than is needed by humans.

In the 21st century, climate change is becoming more severe and social disparities are widening due to the excessive production activities and excessive expansion of capitalism of the last century. The problem we face is not how to create what we don't have, but how to correct the current situation where we create too much, how do we bring capitalism to an appropriate size when it has grown too large. We have to draw a new big story to deal with these problem.

I just want to make furniture... but I want to always ask myself questions about whether the furniture I'm trying to make is really necessary, and what kind of story it's being made in.