A Chair with All the Angles

By Wolf Von Eckardt

Adjustable accessories can be tailored to workers'body sizes

O.K., lean way back in the chair. Rest your head and stretch out. Relax. Now get to work.

Work? Yes, indeed. Ergonomic furniture design--that is, designing for the human frame--is confirming what some people suspected long ago: the mind seems to work better when the body is firmly and comfortably supported in a reclining position. Thomas Jefferson liked to read and write while taking his ease on a specially adapted chaise longue. Mark Twain and Winston Churchill often worked lying back, their heads supported, facing their books or writing pads at eye level. In such a position, they were able to prevent many a pain in the neck.

The trouble with some chairs today, says Industrial Designer Niels Diffrient, is that they "look as though the designer never saw a human body." Diffrient has come up with an innovative, adjustable lounge chair engineered on anatomic rather than aesthetic principles. The top of a radically new furniture line designed by Diffrient for computer-age offices, the chair will be introduced on the market next spring by the U.S. manufacturer SunarHauserman. Probable price, including accessories: around $3,500.

Diffrient's furniture system consists of a number of components that can be put together to suit the individual tasks, comfort and predilections of every worker in today's automated office. Surfaces can be lifted or lowered, tilted or joined every which way; adjustable video supports, telephone holders, In and Out baskets, bookshelves, copyholders and other accessories can be readily attached. Says Diffrient: "We set out to design an office furniture system that fits everyone who uses it--from the shortest woman to the tallest man--like their clothes or shoes."

The lounge chair, which Diffrient named for Jefferson, has none of the sleek elegance of the chaise longues designed by Mies van der Rohe or Le Corbusier, nor the coziness of the Eames lounge chair. But then, none of them is adjustable and completely comfortable. In designing his Jefferson chair, Diffrient set aside all questions of form and tried to think like an engineer. After much trial and error, he arrived at a design that suspends the chair on a central axis that pivots much as the body does at the waist and hips. The pivoting motion is controlled by a gas-cylinder mechanism activated from the armrest. The headrest supports the neck at the underside of the cranium. The elbows repose without being pushed up.

Adding the separate ottoman or footrest makes the chair blissfully relaxing. Adding the "task accessories" for reading and writing makes it a marvelously efficient work station. The lamp and a small round side table for a telephone, ashtray, vase, drink or whatnot are supported by a freestanding column. Another column supports a television set or computer monitor, as well as a cantilevered, tilting table that can hold a computer keyboard or serve as a writing surface. The columns can be placed anywhere. The computer disc drive goes in an upright console next to the chair. Diffrient maintains that "the energy you save by reducing the strain of holding yourself up and worrying about whether your back aches or your arms hurt is directly converted to the work at hand."

A lean, silver-haired Mississippian, Diffrient, 55, has always disdained the merely stylish, devoting most of his professional life to accommodating what he calls the "human factor" in the tools and furnishings of our high-tech civilization. He started as a painter, but switched to industrial design while studying at the famed Cranbrook Academy of Art, near Detroit. During that time he apprenticed with Architect-Designer Eero Saarinen, making drawings and models for office chairs. He eventually won acclaim for his own chairs but is just as proud of the tractors, lift trucks and airplane interiors he helped create during 25 years with Henry Dreyfuss Associates, a leading industrial-design firm. At Dreyfuss, he also helped develop an encyclopedic series of guidebooks for designers called Humanscale, which provides data about the dimensions and movements of the human body.

Diffrient's chair prompts visionary speculations about the office of the future. Perhaps the executive desk will become obsolete except as a status symbol to sit behind, not to write on. And what of the conference room of tomorrow? How about a congenial grouping of Jefferson lounge chairs, their occupants all watching the displays presented on their individual monitors? --By Wolf Von Eckardt