CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/15/2019

Hans J. Wegner and other masters of Danish "golden-age" chair design are collected in this chic compendium

"The chair is a very difficult object," Ludwig Mies van der Rohe once said. "Everyone who has ever tried to make one knows that. There are endless possibilities and many problems—the chair has to be light, it has to be strong, it has to be comfortable. It is almost easier to build a skyscraper than a chair." Featured image—of Hans J. Wegner's 1950 Wishbone Chair—is reproduced from Strandberg Publishing's new and beautifully designed encyclopedic history of twentieth-century Danish chair design, The Danish Chair. Wegner's most successful chair, the Wishbone was a variation on the modern bentwood chair. Less expensive to manufacture than his iconic 1949 frame "Chair," the Wishbone builds on the design of ancient klismos chairs. "It has a steam-bent backrest and a Chinese splat," author Christian Holmsted Olesen writes, "and the fragmentation of the backrest is reminiscent of the slanted struts on Windsor chairs, while the undercarriage has similarities with old peasant chairs. Wegner's Wishbone Chair is not only a refinement of a traditional type, it is also a synthesis of several different models and hence something completely new."