Detours into the arcane world of chair design and some tangental driftings into non-furniture related subjects. Corrections and contributions welcome.

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• Café chair, Pelikan Designs for Fritz Hansen:   This must have seemed such a great idea at the time. One notable aspect of this 1983 chair is that you never see it in use despite it's indestructable structure and immovable weight. It is neat but not beautiful, it can't help looking wonky. The idea of rotating four chair legs into a diamond plan may have grown from an original three-legged idea – the Café Costes chair was very influential. It stacks by having a slot in the middle of the seat for the single back leg. Fair enough - the seat doesn't perform much function in the middle between your buttocks if you sit up straight. The downside is it looks like a commode, heightened by the hospital white colour and the grey rubber of the seat pad and back rest. The rubber gives it a very tactile sense, albeit clammy. The sweeping back rest is good to grab and provides good grip to cope with the weight (oh have I already mentioned that?) Fritz Hansen have a great tradition of Scandinavian designers and this was a bold departure. Sometimes you don't know until you try.
• Chapel chair:   Thousands of these plain wooden chairs were used in non-conformist churches and thousands are now found in vegetarian cafes and All Bar One pubs. Simple spindles and a thick profiled seat, these are chairs for rural chapel worship. They have a shelf at the back for hymn book, and the rails can also be used for hats and handbags. This one is from Kinsbourne Green Methodist church in Hertfordshire. It seems to have truncated legs from wear or from being trimmed. I love these chairs and they remain an inspiration.
• David Chipperfield chair:   The architect David Chipperfield (Hepworth Wakefield, Turner Contemporary, Neues Museum Berlin, etc) has had great success with his recent folding Piana chair for Alessi. This chair is less familiar - I acquired it in the early 1990s from the Aram shop clearance sale. The chair's wide, grey tubular frame provides an armature for the seat and back legs. The birch ply seat is very narrow within the frame giving it an odd scale conflict - kitchen chair versus tub chair. It is suspended within the frame with rods, the timber held by further grey metal, increasing the narrowness. This dual form is awkward especially where the seat back is next to the frame. What is satisfying is the colour combination - light timber and grey. The chair looks inviting but is painfully inhospitable once you have committed your weight. The shooting pain of discomfort comes from the back 'rest' and the metal tubing frame does not offer compensation for resting your arms. Chipperfield’s rectilinear architectural aesthetic do not quite translate to ergonomic seating.
• Mackintosh Smoking Room Chair:   If furniture was ever architecture writ small Charles Rene Mackintosh was its main proponent. This oak chair has the solidness and spatial qualities of a small house, with homely interior and wind and rain screened exterior. Essentially this is a box. If you are going to make a box-type chair Macintosh shows how to lighten the heaviness with graceful verticals, gentle curves and fine points. The chair is defined by four gracefully tapered posts, sweeping armrests and subtle slots. The two posts at the back form the legs, carry the back rest and keep rising heavenward like Gaudi spires, finishing with a flat top that returns the chair to it's domestic space. Like other architect-designed chairs this is as uncomfortable as anything I have tried, and it is the backrest again – too low, too vertical. As a hall chair it is excellent for dumping coats and hats.
• Leather chair and aluminium chair:   This is a magnificent, comfortable and stylish chair with a heavy leather bucket forming back and arms sitting on an aluminium base. I don't know the designer, don't know the manufacturer and the only other place I've seen it is in photograph of a Sydney restaurant. This carries a bit of Mark Newsom retro aero-aesthetic, a bit of sports car and a bit of gentlemens’ club leather. Its cast aluminium base owes something to car styling and the legs grow organically from this like a horse chestnut shell. I found it in a second hand office furniture store in Manor Park.
• Stacking chair:   This stacking chair is highly dynamic, lightweight, economic and pretty odd. The chair is made from cast aluminium sides, with 4mm bent ply on seat and back. The amount of material is pared right down, the apparent fragility belies its robustness. What makes it seem risky is the huge cantilever at the back and the extreme acute angle and thinness of the back legs, which taper to thin points. What is special is that the metal sides are each a single cast element with a U section - hollow on the inside. These are connected with rods and the bent ply attached on top. Used for mass seating, this specimen has seen some action and is knocked and chipped. Removed from a skip when Anglia Ruskin University moved to its smart new campus in Chelmsford with swish new furniture.
• Jasper Morrison: Plywood chair 1988:   Constructed from plywood, glue and screws. Originally made for the installation "Some New Items for the Home" in Berlin. Later produced by Vitra, Switzerland Photo: Studio Frei/Vitra.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  This simple chair follows the more experimental Plywood chair. The first time I saw Jasper Morrison’s Plywood Chair in 1989 my heart sank and the designer inside screamed - I have always been fascinated by making chairs from flat material, cut not bent, and Morrison reduced it to the basic essential elements, but also made it ergonomic. It audaciously upstaged the prolific and dominant Phillipe Starck. This sloid beech chair with a coloured square seat retains the simplicity but returns it to the conventions of utility furniture, with a rounded top back rest. Very comfortable and robust despite its conventional construction.
• Rodney Kinsman Tokyo Chair:   The chair was ubiquitous in the 1980s in offices, shops and kitchens. Totally simple and insipired, spatially fascinating, the most enduring of a lot of over-the-top design from that era. The arcing stretcher is brilliant. Again out-Starcking Starck.