I flew to Barcelona, Spain, to go sitting. Some people think that paintings embody culture. I think chairs do it better. My logic is simple: If chairs really are miniaturized architecture, as all chair-designing architects argue, then people ought to take their seating more seriously.
And Barcelonans do.
Take the landmark seating by Mies van der Rohe and Antoni Gaudi. Mies’ sleek Barcelona Chair from 1929, now enshrined in the rebuilt Barcelona Pavilion, tends to bend visitors into solitary, meditative postures. Gaudi’s wildly tiled serpentine benches in Guell Park from 1914 inspire people to stake out snug protective coves: a klatch of Asian tourists here, a band of uniformed schoolgirls there.
These are not just chairs, but experiments in social engineering, each designed to give its sitter a special outlook on life–aloof in the Mies, gregarious in the Gaudi.
Over the last 10 years, Catalonia’s best chair designers–architects like Oscar Tusquets, Alfredo Arribas and Jorge Pensi, and designers like Pete Sans, Pepe Cortes and Javier Mariscal–have argued that their smallest work may help to build civilization better than a major opus like a building. After all, sitting organizes society; it bonds families and introduces strangers.
Are they kidding? Aren’t chairs just furniture?
But Barcelona is not like America, where chairs are no big deal. Our frumpy domestic models blankly face televisions, while our frillier chairs decorate living and dining rooms devoid of guests. And public seating conveys the message, “Don’t even think about parking here.”
Daily life in Barcelona is warmer. Family dining is so sacred that workers navigate four rush hours to hunker down for long lunches and dinners. And there’s life after late-night dinners. Bars of every personality and price offer excuses for hanging out: coffee, Catalan champagne, beer, cocktails and more coffee. Management never gives sedentary patrons the bum’s rush. In Barcelona, even the humble bar stool is respected as a catalyst for social contact, the electricity of civilization.
Seats with a view
On the Ramblas, the crowded, tree-lined boulevard linking the Placa de Catallunya (with its Catalan spelling) to the waterfront plazas of the port, entrepreneurs offer pay-per-view seating: skinny metal cafe chairs lined up along the sidewalk for watching pedestrians. Spectators rent both chairs and pavement for a modest fee–no cover, no minimum.
En route to the Metro, along the Passeig de Gracia, grand boulevard of the elegant Eixample district, I paused to lounge on one of the local street lamps. It was a wild concoction, actually a couch-light, designed by an architect, Pere Falques i Urpi, in 1906. Curly wrought-iron stanchions spring up from a tile-covered base that doubles as a comfortable, sofa-shape bench. Sit down and you become part of the civic artwork, as the architect must have intended.
I stopped in the office of the architect Arribas. Through a foyer overcrowded with a fascinating stock of Arribas’ chair prototypes, I proceeded to a meeting room equally crowded with his wavy, tall-back Pila chairs, shaped with a wry sense of proportion.
Although the architect has advanced from designing scenery for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics to building cutting-edge skyscrapers in Japan and China, he exudes humble charm.
“I work in many different sizes,” Arribas explained with a smile.
