CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/4/2015

Hans J. Wegner: Just One Good Chair

Just One Good Chair, Hatje Cantz's stellar monograph on Hans J. Wegner, undisputed master of Danish chair design, begins with this 1952 statement by Wegner: "If only you could design just one good chair in your life… But you simply cannot." Over the course of the next 250 oversized, heavily illustrated pages, the reader is treated to more than 500 designs, each more refined and lighthearted than the next. The look of the book is sophisticated and clean; the writing, by Designmuseum Danmark's Christian Holmsted Olesen, is alive. "All that talk about 'the chair'—it's nonsense," Olesen quotes Wegner from 1992. "Because the chair isn't there. I have the feeling that the more I work on it, the more it keeps moving farther and farther away. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. You can't make something definitive. Only people who don't understand what it's all about say so. I still think it can be done better—maybe with just four equal sticks." See more books from our 2015 Holiday Gift Guide. >>