Chair: Amazon.ca: Galen Cranz: Books

Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

The oldest surviving chair comes from the tomb of King Tut. "Roman chairs were rare, decorative items of luxury." Chairs themselves represent the West?or the "barbarians"?to cultures that have done without them. Office seating uses shape, fabric and size to make clear which chair belongs to the boss. And current home seating?even the "male" La-Z-Boy?increasingly tries to accommodate women's bodies and tastes. So reports Cranz (The Politics of Park Design), a professor of architecture at the U.C.-Berkeley, in this concise, multidisciplinary gem. Cranz begins by surveying the chair's historical kinds, styles and meanings; then addresses issues of back support, body shape and ergonomics; and ends up in a vigorous, detailed argument against the standard right-angled chair and "chair-desk complex," in favor of "body-conscious design" in an attractively described Ideal Workplace. "Sitting is hard work," Cranz's research reveals; seatmakers should, she says, abandon the common principle of lower-back support; the Alexander Technique of somatic therapy holds lessons for furniture designers; "human beings are not designed to hold any single posture for long periods"; garden-variety office furniture is bad for you; and the famous chairs of Modernism are, in general, even worse. Cranz's clear book?half survey, half polemic?may successively delight, instruct and alarm professors in their endowed chairs, designers at their slanted tables, drivers in drivers' seats, parents with carseats and, of course, the armchair intellectual. 85 photographs and illustrations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Berkeley architecture professor Cranz takes a radical departure from her first book, The Politics of Park Design, in offering up a soundly intellectual perspective on the chair--its history, styles, uses, and evolution. Far from being an object of desire, the four-legged wonder as commonly designed and perceived wreaks havoc on our bodies, making the phrase "comfortable chair" a thoroughly modern oxymoron. In fact, Cranz examines in depth most of our sitting apparatuses--from Breuer's Cresca chair to Norway's Balans--and finds most wanting. Her solution? A five-point checklist, a new philosophical perspective (somatics, the science of body-mind relationships), and a range of novel ways to align and support torsos properly. Provocative yet thoughtful, with more than a kernel of truth. Barbara Jacobs --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Inside This Book (Learn More)

First Sentence
In 1852, an English colonialist working in India voiced his complaints about the local workmen. Read the first page

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Customer Reviews

15 Reviews

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
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Average Customer Review

4.4 out of 5 stars (15 customer reviews)

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4.0 out of 5 stars Great, but could've touched more on breathing and meditation, Jun 11 2004

By

Alex Ivanov (Burnaby, BC Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Chair Rethinking Culture Body And Design (Hardcover)

This book is a really impressive interdisciplinary work, and was useful in helping me buy the "perfect" chair. (Actually one of the author's most interesting points is that a perfect posture does not exist, since movement is inherent in human bodies.) It would have been nice if the production was a little better with more sophisticated photos and colour, but the content is all there. Except that I feel the author should have made much more reference to the mind-body disciplines and meditation. For example, a key concept in meditation is that one should sit with one's back straight because the energy moves up the spine better that way. I was hoping to read something about how that relates to work and sitting in front of a workstation, as well as read about how sitting affects breathing. But other than that, a great book.

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2.0 out of 5 stars This is the review I wrote for the Human Factors Society, Mar 25 2004

By

Rani Lueder (http://humanics-es.com) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Chair (Paperback)

Galen Cranz on "The Chair"
1998, 253 pp.
WW Norton & Company
ISBN 0-393-04655-9

This book has interesting content on seating and sitting. Having once spent my vacation scouring Europe's museums for the earliest representation of a chair (earliest I could find was 1570), I looked forward to opening its covers.

Dr. Cranz teaches Environmental Design at the UC Berkeley Architecture Dept. Not surprisingly, she cuts a wide swath on seating, spanning history, sociology, industrial design, architecture, ergonomics, and holistic body/mind approaches - particularly the Alexander technique.

Parts of her book are engrossing. In particular, her historical perspective of how chair design has evolved historically [if accurate] may be unmatched. Her discussion of the holistic aspects of posture is also interesting.

That said, this book is not noteworthy for the caliber of its review of the ergonomics research on sitting postures and seating. Much of it is plain hogwash.

Throughout the book she refers to us as "ergonomicists" [should be "ergonomists"] and claims the discipline is derived from the Greek "ergon" and "omics" [should be "nomos" (laws)].

It is sometimes painful to read her sweeping generalizations. Dr. Cranz writes that ergonomic researchers "have concluded that the workstation should be an indication of the worker's status" (p. 55) . . . and "status differences have to be maintained, ergonomicists say" (p. 56), citing as evidence two office planning guides written by and for architects that fail to mention ergonomists.

She misrepresents research, as when she castigates Dr. Etienne Grandjean's "poor reasoning" in Fitting the Task to the Man, writing "Amazingly, Grandjean starts with the slump as a goal" (p. 108). Drs. Grandjean et al's research had actually documented computer users' self-selected postures. These researchers reported that rather than sitting upright, the computer users they observed tended to recline somewhat.

She cites findings from a small laboratory study by Drs. Bendix et al. as proof that lumbar supports on chair backrests are unnecessary (p. 109) --- but not the many studies that contradict. Minor assertions are meticulously cited, but questionable conclusions often are not sourced.

If you are looking for a thorough analysis of seated posture, this is not the book for you. It provides a unique and multidisciplinary perspective on the context of seating, but please take her review of the ergonomics research on sitting postures and seating design with a heavy dose of salt.

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3.0 out of 5 stars The Chair: A different perspective, Oct 1 2003

By

Altaf Engineer (Champaign, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Chair (Paperback)

How many of us are aware of the furniture we use in our everyday lives? These are things we feel, touch and see everyday. Yet they are always in the back of our subconcious, we never really notice them, or realise how these pieces of furniture affect us physically, as well as psychologically.
"The Chair" makes us look at the ordinary chair as something beyond a piece of furniture and as a symbol of wealth, status, honor, culture and comfort. In its own way, it shapes our everyday life and things related to it.
The author traces the origins of the chair through human history and how it changed and evolved through the ages. Going deep into the issue of chair design, the author tears commonly held views about comfort into shreds and illustrates how these "comfortable" chairs actually harm the human body. After taking a good look at ergonomics, Cranz talks about the body's conciousness and how it is related to the sitting posture. With the help of somatics and the Alexander technique, she says we can improve the ways in which we sit and improve our comfort.
What captured my attention the most was the manner in which this opens up the mind to different psychological and physical effects that a commonplace object like the chair can have on human beings and how we can improve our daily lives by thinking about these issues.

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A great book to gain broad knowledge about the chair
It is an easy reading and houmorous book. It deals with many aspects of sitting and seats, including aesthetics, style, ergonomics and as a status symbol. Read more

Published on Oct 25 2002 by Dr Thiruvarudchelvan

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful book about a commonplace object.
Galen Cranz has provided a comprehensive, thought-provoking - and very readable - book about something so "ordinary" that we seldom give it much thought even though it... Read more

Published on Jun 23 2000 by Will