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| 251 DIFFERENT CHAIRS |
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. . . when you are ready to furnish rooms, choose the variety of furniture as carefully as you have made the building, so that each piece of furniture, loose or built in, has the same unique and organic individuality as the rooms and alcoves have—each different, according to the place it occupies-—sequence of SITTING SPACES (142), SITTING CIRCLE ( 18 5) , BUILT-IN SEATS (202).
People are different sizes; they sit in different ways. And yet there is a tendency in modern times to make all chairs alike.
Of course, this tendency to make all chairs alike is fueled by the demands of prefabrication and the supposed economies of scale. Designers have for years been creating “perfect chairs”— chairs that can be manufactured cheaply in mass. These chairs are made to be comfortable for the average person. And the institutions that buy chairs have been persuaded that buying these chairs in bulk meets all their needs.
But what it means is that some people are chronically uncomfortable; and the variety of moods among people sitting gets entirely stifled.
Obviously, the “average chair” is good for some, but not for everyone. Short and tall people are likely to be uncomfortable. And although situations are roughly uniform—in a restaurant everyone is eating, in an office everyone is working at a table— even so, there are important distinctions: people sitting for different lengths of time; people sitting back and musing; people sitting aggressively forward in a hot discussion; people sitting formally, waiting for a few minutes. If the chairs are all the same, these differences are repressed, and some people are uncomfortable.
What is less obvious, and yet perhaps most important of all, is this: we project our moods and personalities into the chairs we sit in. In one mood a big fat chair is just right; in another
1158 251 DIFFERENT CHAIRS
mood, a rocking chair; for another, a stiff upright; and yet again, a stool or sofa. And, of course, it isn’t only that we like to switch according to our mood; one of them is our favorite chair, the one that makes us most secure and comfortable; and that again is different for each person. A setting that is full of chairs, all slightly different, immediately creates an amosphere which supports rich experience; a setting which contains chairs that are all alike puts a subtle straight jacket on experience.
Therefore:
Never furnish any place with chairs that are identically the same. Choose a variety of different chairs, some big, some small, some softer than others, some rockers, some very old, some new, with arms, without arms, some wicker, some wood, some cloth.
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Where chairs are placed alone and where chairs are gathered, reinforce the character of the places which the chairs create with pools of light (252), each local to the group of chairs it marks. . . .
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252 POOLS OF LIGHT**
. . . this pattern helps to finish small social spaces like alcoves (179) and workspace enclosure (183), larger places like
COMMON AREAS AT THE HEART (129), ENTRANCE ROOM (130),
and flexible office space (146), and the furnishing of rooms like EATINC ATMOSPHERE (182), SITTING CIRCLE (185), and different chairs (25 1). It even helps to generate warm colors (250).
Uniform illumination—the sweetheart of the lighting engineers—serves no useful purpose whatsoever. In fact, it destroys the social nature of space, and makes people feel disoriented and unbounded.
Look at this picture. It is an egg-crate ceiling, with dozens of evenly spaced fluorescent lights above it. It is meant to make the light as flat and even as possible, in a mistaken effort to imitate the sky.
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| Flat, even light. |
But it is based on two mistakes. First of all, the light outdoors is almost never even. Most natural places, and especially the
conditions under which the human organism evolved, have dappled light which varies continuously from minute to minute, and from place to place.
More serious, it is a fact of human nature that the space we use as social space is in part defined by light. When the light is perfectly even, the social function of the space gets utterly destroyed: it even becomes difficult for people to form natural human groups. If a group is in an area of uniform illumination, there are no light gradients corresponding to the boundary of the group, so the definition, cohesiveness, and “existence” of the group will be weakened. If the group is within a “pool” of light, whose size and boundaries correspond to those of the group, this enchances the definition, cohesiveness, and even the phenomenological existence of the group.
One possible explanation is suggested by the experiments of Hopkinson and Longmore, who showed that small bright light sources distract the attention less than large areas which are less bright. These authors conclude that local lighting over a work table allows the worker to pay more attention to his work than uniform background lighting does. It seems reasonable to infer that the high degree of person to person attention required to maintain the cohesivencss of a social group is more likely to be sustained if the group has local lighting, than if it has uniform background lighting. (See R. G. Hopkinson and J. Longmore, “Attention and Distraction in the Lighting of Workplaces,” Ergonomics, 2, 1959, p. 321 ff. Also reprinted in R. G. Hopkinson, Lighting, London: HMSO, 1963, pp. 261—68.)
On-the-spot observation supports this conjecture. At the International House, University of California, Berkeley, there is a large room which is a general waiting and sitting lounge for guests and residents. There are 42 seats in the room, 12 of them are next to lamps. At the two times of observation we counted a total of 21 people sitting in the room; 13 of them chose to sit next to lamps. These figures show that people prefer sitting near lights (X2 11.4, significant at the 0.1% level). Yet the
overall light level in the room was high enough for reading. We conclude that people do seek “pools of light.”
Everyday experience bears out the same observation in hundreds of cases. Every good restaurant keeps each table as a
CONSTRUCTION
separate pool of light, knowing that this contributes to its privai and intimate ambience. In a house a truly comfortable old chnii “yours,” has its own light in dimmer surroundings—so tha you retreat from the bustle of the family to read the paper ir, peace. Again, house dining tables often have a single lamp suspended over the table—the light seems almost to act like glue for all the people sitting round the table. In larger situations the same thing seems to be true. Think of the park bench, under a solitary light, and the privacy of the world which it creates for a pair of lovers. Or, in a trucking depot, the solidarity of the group of men sipping coffee around a brightly lit coffee stand.