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People now spend more time sitting down than ever before in history. A minor achievement of modern civilization, maybe, but it could explain why producing a chair has been an obligatory rite for ambitious designers of this century. Charles Eames is still famous mainly for his chairs, and the best-known works of today's European café-society designers--Philippe Starck, Enzo Mari--are chairs. Aalto, Breuer and Mies made their marks in the '20s partly by making chairs, and such contemporary architects as Gehry, Meier, Graves, Hollein, Venturi and Ambasz have all felt obliged to design chairs as well...
...late '70s and early '80s, office-furniture manufacturers scrambled to get Ergon knockoffs on the market. "Ergonomics went down the tube," says Stumpf, "when it became just a marketing buzz word." Stumpf, meanwhile, carried on his experiments. He had built twelve prototypes for the Ergon; for the Equa, designed in collaboration with Don Chadwick, there were 27. Before Equa, there were two kinds of office chairs: seat and back could be separate, as in Ergon, or they could be one solid shell. Stumpf and Chadwick found a new material (Du Pont's Rynite, a reinforced fiber glass) and thereby...
Having topped himself, Stumpf yearns to broaden his range. "To tell you the truth," he says, "I'm bored with designing for the office. Bored stiff." Among the things he would like to design are baby strollers that do not jiggle, an airplane with an observation deck, a taxicab with a glass roof, and police uniforms and cars that "don't scare the hell out of kids." His manner is sparky, one part anger to two parts joy, like a more thoughtful, humble Lee lacocca. "Ninety-five per-cent of industrial designers don't design," he says. "They are essentially...
Stumpf wants the best parts of childhood made available again, the mixture of surprise and ritual, comfort and wonder. Images of his own youth in a polyglot St. Louis neighborhood pop up again and again in his conversations about design. "I used to crawl behind the radio," says Stumpf, son and grandson of engineers, "and stare at the tubes." Almost every machine, he says, is at some level a toy. "The concept of jauntiness is a quality lost completely in design. It is a wonderful quality. The horse and buggy had it." By jaunty he does not mean arch...
...almost purely visual ambitions of such hipster objects, he worries, are misleading design students. "They all want to do teapots," he says. "It's like all their nerve endings are connected directly to their eyes. Technology is a nonsubject to them. They want to design, but they don't want to build." Stumpf, a big, lusty child of the Midwest, wants to make things that work as well as delight. --By Kurt Andersen