The History of the Office Chair

5000 years of history have led to the innovation that is the ergonomic office chair.

What is the history of the chair? What is the origin of ergonomics?

Tracing the evolution of chairs throughout human history has a unique quality, noted by writer and historian Witold Rybczynski. 

“An old model of a chair can be just as useful as it ever was, and that really sets it apart from most or at least many technologies, like, say, a smartphone, which changes every year. An old smartphone in 20 years will be just a curiosity. It won’t have any functional purpose.”

– Witold Rybczynski

 

Unlike other types of technology which have undergone total transformative changes at every level throughout the years, a chair from any time, and any place, can still fulfill its purpose today.

This makes the history of the chair to be less of an evolutionary path, and more of a cultural one. The elements that inform the form and function of chairs throughout time are not out of evolutionary necessity from a changed way that we sit. What is changing is our values, our tastes, and the things we hold dear. It is these pillars that form the legs of our chairs, and their evolution that drive the way our chairs have changed over the years. This understood, we will now be able to start at the very beginning of chairs, and follow their lineage to our modern day, where the ergonomic office chair is more than a simple utilitarian furniture piece.

When was the first chair invented?

The Cycladic Islands in the Aegean Sea, 2,800 - 2,700 B.C. Perhaps not a physical chair, but a sculpture of one is the first historical record that chair historians can find of a man-made model. The sculpture is a figurine, who is a musician sitting down while playing the harp. The musician appears to be sitting on what looks like a typical dining chair that you would see today, with four straight legs and a matching straight back. At the time of the sculpture’s production, sitting was reserved only for the elite, as a symbol of heightened status. Ancient Egyptians allowed different types of sitting according to one’s social class, with the general populace sitting on the ground or stools, and only the highest order of people given the privilege of sitting on chairs with backs or armrests.

A different sitting order sprouted in the fifth century B.C. in Greece with the invention of the klismos, which was an early appearance of the type of ornate stylings that later appeared in the 18th century in France and China. This type of chair featured a curved backrest and curved legs, and did not discriminate between classes, available for every type of potential sitter. It was not a throne, but a unifying democratic chair, mirroring the democracy of the Ancient Greek and Roman societies of the time.

“Virtually everybody is sitting in a klismos chair. We have women, men, gods, and clearly important people, musicians, workers.” 

The social stratification of the seat had its resurgence in the Middle Ages. People that were ordinary had fewer possessions, and possessed little furniture, leading them to sit on whatever was available to them. This included benches, barrels, and the ground. Only very important people had access to chairs with arms and backs, this dynamic richly captured by the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder in his work, which depicted the truths of peasant life. The back and forth movement of the involvement of social class with the discrimination of sitting, from democratic to hierarchical customs, occured repeatedly throughout history.

It is believed that the office chair we know today originated more than two centuries ago in the 1840s, when Charles Darwin attached some legs and wheels to his chair so that he could manoeuvre around his workspace to access his specimens more easily. The wooden arm chair on wheels was the start of something much bigger, adapting our furniture to serve our needs and aid our jobs.

Business began expanding with the introduction of rail transport in the mid-19th century, and more staff were needed to run operations. An increased number of clerical workers became a part of the work model, all of which spent a great deal of time sitting every day. A new system for improved comfort while working while seated all day was necessary, and so in 1849, the American inventor Thomas E. Warren stepped up. He designed the Centripetal Spring Armchair, which used a swivel mechanism and castors to enable workers in an office to reach things, turn, and move around without having to completely stand up and out of the chair.

Designers began to tap into the power of modern ergonomics during the 1970s. The Vertebra Chair, designed by Emilio Ambasz and Giancarlo Piretti, was created using the motif and structure of the human spine, and was one of the very first seating solutions on the market that was automatically adjustable to the human form.

Herman Miller, in 1976, launched the Ergon Chair, which we now know as a pioneering product of task chair design. It was the first chair to be designed to improve comfort for the sitter, while sustaining the sitter’s physical health and posture. The seat and back were filled with foam, and the back sported more complex spine support than ever seen before in a chair. It was adjustable through gas-lift levers which controlled the height and tilt, and the five pronged legs traveled smoothly with easy-glide castors on each prong. Stumpf, the designer of the Ergon Chair, pushed the envelope on ergonomics, bending the rules that were truthfully counterproductive to comfort and utility. Chairs rarely lowered any less than 18” from the floor across all furniture companies, but the average woman’s leg was 16” from thigh to the floor, so this was corrected in the new ergonomic wave.

The 1990s tech boom brought forth an evolved office chair design which had the premise of providing not what the eye wants to see, but what the body needs to function. Notable features of the Herman Miller Aeron included the reactive tilt, and the mesh back that helps to support the user’s posture, and regulate body temperature.

The evolution of office chair design followed the evolution of our culture. A bulletproof chair was released in 2013 following the cultural shock of the devastating Sandy Hook attack, and the Steelcase Gesture Chair was a breakthrough in terms of setting a precedent for the form of the ergonomic chair we know and improve upon today. The Gesture Chair was created to study how people use their workspaces throughout the day, and 9 new unknown postures were found, planting the seed for new technologies to make sure that workers are supported and kept healthy in these postures.

Today, ergonomic furniture companies are producing chairs with the highest level of technology as it is being created, with ergonomics no longer a new trend but a well established religion for many. Canadian startup  RISEDESK has two fantastic models of ergonomic office chairs, which each in their own right act as paragons of comfortable office life, with more adjustable features than ever seen before in a like product.

Chairs have come a long way from logs, barrels, and spring-loaded velvet seats, and they have only evolved to be more comfortable, more accessible, and more accommodating to our everyday tasks. With the current corporate model seating the majority of employees at desks for the duration of their working hours, it is vital that your chair has the proper features to support you, and keep you healthy.

The nature of our chairs changed with the evolution of human nature. The values of the people in the time are what construct and shape the chairs, so make sure that your chair is aligned with your values today. When you have the choice,  make sure that you rise.

How do you think the chair will evolve in the future?

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Office chairs are under siege—and it’s not entirely a bad thing.

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As more mobile workers are unshackling from their desks, almost any moderately comfortable perch qualifies as office seating today.

But technically speaking, office chairs belong to a special furniture category: They typically have wheels, lumbar support, and a load-bearing gas-lift leg—all designed to give workers the healthiest, most comfortable seat possible. To counteract the notorious pitfalls of sitting, industrial designers have been coming up with ergonomic solutions for decades, resulting in the dizzying array of styles and options.

From ancient Egyptian artisans to Charles Darwin, who created the first modern office chair—yes, really—figuring out a better way to get stuff done while seated has been an age-old human obsession. Where will our deepening understanding of human physiology and psychology take the office chair next?

🎧 For more intel on the modern office, listen to the Quartz Obsession podcast episode on office chairs.

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By the digits

83%: Rise of sedentary jobs in the US since 1950

473: Calories a reporter burned in five days of “deskcercising” using an under-the-table cycling equipment

$84 billion: Projected value of the global office furniture market by 2021

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$1,570: Price of Batman’s ultra-high-tech Anthro 904BK Flexible Highback task chair, featured in Batman v Superman

$5,000: Starting bid for Dr. Evil’s motorized executive chair from Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. In International Man of Mystery, the scene-stealing villain also sits on a swiveling version of the Hans Wegner-designed Ox chair which retails for upwards of $10,000.

£38,000 ($49,600): Price of Elysium-R, the world’s most expensive executive chair

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$8,089: Taxpayer dollars spent on a fancy office chair by an West Virginia judge

12,000: Estimated number of seats at Apple’s new headquarters. Jony Ive personally selected the Vitra Pacific task chair designed for its minimalist profile.

250 lbs: Maximum weight an average office chair can support. “Big and tall” models can accommodate weights of up to 800 lbs.

54%: Proportion of American workers who want a better ergonomic office chair

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$2.2 million: Amount a Florida jury awarded a man whose office chair collapsed under him in 2003

86%: Proportion of discarded office chairs in the UK that end up destroyed for materials or dumped in landfills each year

Vocab lesson

Sitzfleisch (ZITS–flysh): “Chair glue.” The German word for the ability to sit through something boring or complex for a considerable amount of time.

Freudian seat

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Sigmund Freud’s office chair was designed to accommodate his strange reading posture. Noted in the nifty compendium Chair: 500 Designs that Matter, the father of psychoanalysis read with his “legs draped over one arm of his desk chair, his book held high and his neck unsupported.” Freud’s daughter Mathilde commissioned designers Felix Augenfeld and Karl Hofmann to create a padded armchair whose armrests could double as a backrest. Freud treasured the one-of-a-kind piece so much that he schlepped it across the UK border when he escaped from the Nazis in 1938. It’s now displayed at the Freud Museum.

Brief history

1900 BC: Drawings and sculptures of forward-tilted stools dating back to the 12th Dynasty are discovered in Egypt. Scholars say the slight angle adjustment helped artisans perform their work.

1840s: Charles Darwin hacks a William IV-style armchair. The father of evolution pimped his office chair with cast-iron bed legs on casters so he could roll around in his lab with greater ease. Historians say Darwin’s makeshift marvel is the first office chair on wheels.

1851: The Centripetal Spring Armchair—one of the first adjustable office chairs—is a hit at the World Fair. The upholstered chair with an elaborate skirt to hide the under-seat springs was so comfortable, it was deemed immoral. In the Victorian era, sitting on an uncomfortable chair was a sign of virtue, refinement, and willpower.

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1904: Frank Lloyd Wright designs a beautiful but unstable office chair for typists. Secretaries soon dubbed the three-legged Larkin Building chair as the “suicide chair” because of its tendency to tip over easily. Wright defended its flawed engineering using the same old Victorian virtue excuse. (See above.)

1925: The healthy office chair craze is born. Designed by a former US Army soldier, the Do/More posture chair posits to raise productivity and improve the sitter’s health, promising to “prevent hemorrhoids, kidney trouble, constipation, and a whole host of other problems caused by slouching in competitors’ chairs,” as the Daily Herald notes.

1954: Charles and Ray Eames’s Pivot Armchair Cast Base on Castors (or “PACC” for short) debuts. The molded fiberglass and plastic chair brings color to drab offices.

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1976: Designers make ergonomics sexy. Emilio Ambasz and Giancarlo Piretti’s “Vertebra chair” aspired to mould with the occupant’s body “as to become virtually invisible and undetectable.”

1994: Herman Miller introduces the Aeron, a radical upgrade that became an emblem of the late 1990s tech boom and a benchmark for today’s office chairs. Using insights from a never-produced chair for the elderly, designers Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf presented a gadgety and fully-adjustable alternative to padded units that came before it. It was a critical and commercial success—chosen for the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection a month before its public debut in Cologne, Germany.

2007: Donald Trump puts his name on a collection of wood and pleather office chairs for Staples.

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2013: Neutral Posture introduces the “Guardian Chair,” an ergonomic computer chair kitted with a bulletproof Kevlar vest to protect students from gunshots. The manufacturer expedited the launch of the $1,900 units after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

2018: With extraordinary fanfare, furniture giant Steelcase unveils SILQ, an ultra-sleek office chair model designed to instantly adapt to a sitter’s body movements without fiddling with knobs and levers—an attempt to unseat the Aeron.

2019: Next year, IKEA plans to release Ubik, a personalized ergonomic chair designed for world’s most extreme sitters. Marketed to gamers who spend up to 20 hours (!) in front of a computer for days on end, Ubik promises to relieve back aches and cramps via a custom-insert fashioned from a 3D scan of the sitters’ buttocks.

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Watch this

Responding to Connie Chung’s challenge during a 1994 interview, Microsoft’s surprisingly agile founder leapt over his office chair in a single bound.

The case for leaning in

Chair settings are tweaked according to cultural norms, according to industrial designer Martin Potrykus of Berlin-based ITO Design. For example, knowing that most Americans like to lean back, office chairs in the US are delivered pre-reclined. In contrast, Japanese workers tend to only occupy the only front of the seat.

The rise and fall of boss chairs

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Much has been said about the Aeron’s ergonomic comfort, but few know about its seminal role in democratizing the look of offices. Until the 1990s, office chairs communicated hierarchy: Costlier, high-back styles were reserved for executives, chairs with arm rests went to mid-level management, and no-frills seating was for secretarial staff and admin personnel. The Aeron was a “rejection of the traditional corporate chair hierarchy,” as architecture professor Witold Rybczynski explains in his book, Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History.

Fun fact

In 2016, Japanese car company Nissan teased obsessive managers with an “intelligent self-parking chair” system that promises to keep open-plan offices looking neat. The motorized Okamura chair was rigged to “automagically” tuck itself under the owners’ desks with a single clap. (The whole thing was a marketing gimmick for the company’s self-parking cars.)

Quotable

“Sitting is to be thought of a compromise position since man in his natural habitat functions best when he is either erect and moving or supine and resting… Many of our ailments are by-products of sitting.”— American industrial designer and ergonomics pioneer Niels Diffrient

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Pop quiz

Which of these famous writers worked sitting down?

• Charles Dickens
• Ernest Hemingway
• Mark Twain
• Virginia Woolf

The future of sitting

After spending years analyzing and testing hundreds of office chairs for his 2011 book, A Taxonomy of Office Chairs, Jonathan Olivares says he’s ready to do without them. Instead of ergonomic models, the celebrated Los Angeles-based industrial designer uses a stool without a backrest as his office chair. “It’s very comfortable for two hours of work, which is all I ever do in one sitting,” Olivares says, referring to the Mezzadro seat designed by Italian modernism pioneer Achille Castiglioni.

“I’m most excited about the trend when we don’t use office chairs anymore,” Olivares says. “There’s a whole other series of workspaces popping up that don’t really rely on the office chair. Sofas are much more important; lounge chairs are interesting,” he tells Quartz (while perched on a poolside recliner).

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Big furniture makers may have an answer for Olivares’s lament. Last month, Steelcase, in tandem with US home furniture retailer West Elm, unveiled a new office furniture collection that very much looks like living room furniture. In the spirit of French designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s experimentation with non-corporate office furniture, the collection aspires to bring a “residential sensibility to the modern office space.”

The correct answer to the quiz is Mark Twain. Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and many others—penned their masterpieces standing up.