Looking Good Is Not Enough

By KURT ANDERSEN

People now spend more time sitting down than ever before in history. A minor achievement of modern civilization, maybe, but it could explain why producing a chair has been an obligatory rite for ambitious designers of this century. Charles Eames is still famous mainly for his chairs, and the best-known works of today's European cafe-society designers--Philippe Starck, Enzo Mari--are chairs. Aalto, Breuer and Mies made their marks in the '20s partly by making chairs, and such contemporary architects as Gehry, Meier, Graves, Hollein, Venturi and Ambasz have all felt obliged to design chairs as well as buildings.

For Minneapolis-based Bill Stumpf, 50, chairs, especially office chairs, have been neither a sideline nor a flashy aesthetic afterthought. The Miesian, Eamesian, entirely worthy benchmark Stumpf set for himself years ago was "to make a beautiful chair comfortable." He accomplished that by drawing on more than a decade of careful thought about chairs--not just how they ought to look, but how officeworkers lean and squirm and relax while sitting in them. Stumpf's Ergon (1976) and Equa (1984) are the two most important chairs, surely, of the past quarter-century, handsome, generous and deeply elegant. They are also ubiquitous: the Herman Miller company has sold nearly 2 million Ergons and, in less than two years, some 350,000 Equas.

Back in 1966 at the University of Wisconsin, Stumpf was already examining precisely the way bodies and furniture get along. The new name for his human-factor investigations, ergonomics, was not yet current, but Stumpf made charts, diagrams and, eventually, time-lapse films, becoming a sort of Muybridge of the 9-to-5 realm. In the mid-'70s at Herman Miller, he began turning that research into drawings. The Ergon is a descendant of Eames' designs, an out-of-sequence missing link between the lucid but barebones molded-plywood chair (1946) and the voluptuous, baroque lounge chair (1956) so beloved of big men with dens. The quiet swerves of Ergon's separate seat and back are subtle, like Noguchi stones made soft and purposeful. No earlier American chair had been mounted on a gas-cylinder post, an innovation that finally buffered the shock for sitters who tend to free-fall rather than descend gently into a desk chair.

During the late '70s and early '80s, office-furniture manufacturers scrambled to get Ergon knockoffs on the market. "Ergonomics went down the tube," says Stumpf, "when it became just a marketing buzz word." Stumpf, meanwhile, carried on his experiments. He had built twelve prototypes for the Ergon; for the Equa, designed in collaboration with Don Chadwick, there were 27. Before Equa, there were two kinds of office chairs: seat and back could be separate, as in Ergon, or they could be one solid shell. Stumpf and Chadwick found a new material (Du Pont's Rynite, a reinforced fiber glass) and thereby an ingenious third design: the Equa shell is continuous, but a graceful H-shaped slice is carved out of the lower back so that it becomes virtually animate, bending like two independent pieces. "One day I took an X-Acto knife on one of our little models," Stumpf recalls, "and I just cut that slip in there. I knew right away it would work." Flex and absolute structural integrity without gimmicks: the chair is its material and structure. In addition, the designers engineered a novel tilt mechanism. Because the pivot is forward, at a point behind the knees, leaning backward in an Equa does not lift one's feet off the floor inexorably.

Having topped himself, Stumpf yearns to broaden his range. "To tell you the truth," he says, "I'm bored with designing for the office. Bored stiff." Among the things he would like to design are baby strollers that do not jiggle, an airplane with an observation deck, a taxicab with a glass roof, and police uniforms and cars that "don't scare the hell out of kids." His manner is sparky, one part anger to two parts joy, like a more thoughtful, humble Lee lacocca. "Ninety-five per-cent of industrial designers don't design," he says. "They are essentially stylists under the aegis of the marketing department." Stumpf hates the raw, unfriendly interiors of the standard school bus. He hates dull, inexpressive Amtrak locomotives. He hates hermetic, inscrutable electronics. "Things should telegraph their ability to come apart. You can't tinker with things anymore!"

Stumpf wants the best parts of childhood made available again, the mixture of surprise and ritual, comfort and wonder. Images of his own youth in a polyglot St. Louis neighborhood pop up again and again in his conversations about design. "I used to crawl behind the radio," says Stumpf, son and grandson of engineers, "and stare at the tubes." Almost every machine, he says, is at some level a toy. "The concept of jauntiness is a quality lost completely in design. It is a wonderful quality. The horse and buggy had it." By jaunty he does not mean arch and joky. "I don't see anything toylike in Memphis," he says of the Italian school of wacky neokitsch furniture. "It would be interesting to give a Memphis piece to a child and see how funny he thought it was."

The almost purely visual ambitions of such hipster objects, he worries, are misleading design students. "They all want to do teapots," he says. "It's like all their nerve endings are connected directly to their eyes. Technology is a nonsubject to them. They want to design, but they don't want to build." Stumpf, a big, lusty child of the Midwest, wants to make things that work as well as delight. --By Kurt Andersen