Seeking comfort in an uncomfortable chair

“One comes home tired after having worked all day and finds an uncomfortable chair.” This is the start to Bruno Munari’s considerations on the choice between aesthetics and functionality when designing furniture. To support his thesis, Munari analyses the most obvious case of the armchair. You must have been seated on countless types of chair: very low ones, ones with a deep seat, ones with sharp edges, and so on. “But be honest : what is more restful than a tuppenny deckchair.”

In Munari’s typically engaging style the great designer reminds us how we could go on inventing furniture each time fashions change when actually all that is needed is to perfect the most comfortable of the existing models, not forgetting the real purpose: comfort and durability.

To corroborate the words of Bruno Munari are the 14 photographs which accompanied the 1944 text that appeared in issue n. 202 of the magazine Domus.