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Common Dimensions is a research platform and print publication that approaches the subject of the chair by asking deceptively obtuse questions: what makes a chair a chair? Ought a chair be defined as any object one can sit on? If so, isn’t a carpet a chair? What about a horse?

It is through such apparently naive lines of enquiry that this project explores the intertwined material, cultural, and political dimensions of the chair. This investigation is conducted through interviews, a collection of texts, and an expansive visual library that includes not just iconic chairs that reinforce the object’s position as a design meme, but also more politically loaded examples from Black Panther founder Huey Newton’s rattan throne to the class stratification exemplified by airline seating.

A chair can signify power, political affiliation, taste, and value in myriad ways. But in its simplest form, the chair is a utilitarian object, and one that’s intimately connected to the human body. Most mass-produced chairs follow certain common dimensions. Seat distance from the ground, depth and width are all determined by specifications that assume a so-called “average” body’s height, weight, degree of mobility, and physical needs. Indeed, the chair and the human form are so closely linked that they share an anatomical lexicon: back, legs, spine, feet, ears, knees, and arms. The chair is also both an extension of and a support for our bodies—besides our clothes, it’s perhaps the design object we are most intimately connected with.

Chairs don’t just support the weight of our bodies, they’re also weighted with symbolic meaning. An empty chair can represent loss or absence, while a gilded chair might evoke wealth or power. When Le Corbusier famously stated “the chair is a machine for sitting,” he was privileging usefulness over aesthetic form. However, even this seemingly functionalist distillation is symbolically loaded, positioning the chair as a sort of Fordist prosthetic designed to enhance worker efficiency. And while ergonomics may have revolutionized comfort in the workplace, even today’s high-tech office chairs embody questions about labour, class, taste, and power.

Common Dimensions investigates the chair as a symbolic, discursive, and designed object in order to explore its broad and diverse expressions: the chair as architecture, the chair as status symbol, the chair as prosthesis, the chair as locus of power, the chair as a tool. This project offers no decisive definition of the chair as a singular, fixed object. Instead, it seeks to expand our understanding of (and connection to) chairs through a collection of interviews with artists, designers, and collectors, an ever-expanding online visual archive, and a growing database of texts that both enlarge upon and complicate the topic.

While much of this project inhabits the digital space, each interview also exists as a print publication that takes on a unique form that seeks to embody the key themes and ideas contained within it.

To get in touch, or to contribute ideas, images, or chairs to Common Dimensions, email Rebecca at rwilki01@risd.edu

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This project was created in collaboration with Gabriel Drozdov who coded this website.