Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [30]
Rockers were good furniture. They were comfortable and gave the user an air of ease and contentment. They give the person sitting in one the impression he’s getting somewhere without adding any of the headaches that come with progress.
From time to time furniture makers say there’s a revived interest in rocking chairs, but I doubt this. For one thing, the front porch has probably been closed in to make the living room bigger and anyway people don’t want anything as mobile or folksy as a rocker in a living room filled with electronic gear.
Comfort in a chair is often in direct ratio to the relationship between the height of the feet and the height of the head. People are always trying to get their feet up. Very likely there is an instinct for self-preservation here because the closer anyone’s feet are to being on a level with the head, the less work the heart has to do to get the blood pumped around.
During the years between World War I and World War II, everyone’s dream of a vacation was a boat trip somewhere on the Mauretania, the Leviathan or one of the Queens to Europe. In their dreams, the man and the woman were stretched out in the bright sunshine on deck chairs in mid-Atlantic. Not many people go by boat anywhere anymore, though, and the deck or steamer chairs were redesigned and moved to the backyard. The wood in those deck chairs has been replaced by tubular aluminum and the canvas by plastic straps. They wouldn’t have lasted five minutes on the deck of the Mauretania in a stiff breeze.
At some time in the last hundred years, we reached the point where more people were working sitting down than on their feet. This could be a milestone unturned by social historians. We have more and more white-collar people and executives sitting in chairs telling people what to do and fewer and fewer people on their feet actually doing anything.
The sitting executives found that they weren’t satisfied not moving at all, so they invented a chair for executives that swivels, rolls forward, backward or sideways and tilts back when the executive, who used to have his feet on the ground, wants to lean back and put them on his mahogany desk.
In many offices the chairs provided for men and for women are symbols that irritate progressive women. The chairs often represent clear distinctions in the relative power of the sexes there. The executive male has his bottom on a cushion, his elbows on armrests. At the desk outside his office, the secretary, invariably a woman, sits erect in a typing chair about as comfortable as an English saddle.
It’s a strange thing and probably says a lot about our rush through life that the word “modern” has an old-fashioned connotation to it when you’re talking about design. I think of Art Deco as modern. It must be because what we call “modern” is just a brand-new design about to become obsolete. Someone is always coming up with what is known as a modern chair. It looks old and silly in a few years but is still referred to as modern.
There are modern chairs that have not become obsolete because they’re so good. Some of them are forty years old but they’re still called modern. Charles Eames designed that plastic bucket seat on tubular legs that will not go out of style. Mies van der Rohe designed the Barcelona chair that you have in the outer lobby of your office if you’re a rich company. That’s going to last like the Windsor and the Boston rockers because it’s comfortable and simply attractive.
Considering how much time we spend sitting, it’s strange our chairs don’t fit us better. No size 6 woman would think of wearing a size 14 dress but a size 48 man who weighs 250 pounds is expected to sit in the same size chair a 98-pound woman sits in. To some extent a chair in a room is considered community property, but in most homes a family arranges itself in the same way day after day when it settles down, and more attention ought to be given chair sizes.
Certain purposeful chairs have been well done but with no regard to