The Chair Every Design School Still Teaches

Forty years on, it is still the first object first-year students are asked to take apart and rebuild.

Reissues are a particular kind of risk. The original has already been judged, and every deviation reads as a correction of somebody else's work.

Alex Suskind, who spent a week in three workshops, has been close to it from the start.

The decision

Eleven components, four joints, and one of them is deliberately harder than it needs to be.

Budget was fixed before the brief was finished, which is the wrong order and, everyone involved agrees, the usual one.

The manufacturer has never changed the design, and has twice refused to licence a simplified version for teaching.

It teaches failure in a way a lecture cannot. The chair simply will not stand up.

one workshop tutor

In practice

Most students get the joinery wrong at the first attempt in the same place: the rear leg, where the grain direction matters more than the drawing suggests.

Whether it sells is almost beside the point for the archive. The chair exists again, and the drawings are complete for the first time since 1971.

The first week brought the kind of attention nobody plans for, and the second brought the criticism that actually changed something.

What they will not say, on the record, is how close it came to being cancelled in the spring.

What comes next

Which is, the tutors agree, the reason it still works.