MULTI-USE CHAIR
FREDERICK KIESLER, 1942
Okay, first picture the room. One of the strangest art galleries New York has ever seen. The walls curve. The paintings have no frames. They float off them, on little arms. The lights blink on and off. Every few minutes, a train roars through the room. Opening night, Peggy Guggenheim wears one earring by Tanguy and one by Calder. On purpose. Her way of staying neutral, she said, "between the Surrealists and the abstract crowd." So... somebody had to design this room. His name was Frederick Kiesler. Architect, technically. Philip Johnson later called him the greatest non-building architect of our time. Compliment? Insult? With Kiesler, hard to tell. Legendary ideas. Almost nothing built. Now, a room like this cannot have normal chairs. A normal chair is bossy. It tells you where the front is, where your knees go. Useless in a gallery where even the walls have lost interest in being walls. So Kiesler builds this. Oak and linoleum, curved like a wave. His own description: it curves down, surges up, and falls again. An object without beginning or end. Walk around it. Now tip it over in your head. Once. Again. Every way it lands, it gets a new job. Seat. Table. Stand. Pedestal. Weird little stage. Thing you lean on while pretending you understand things. You don't approach it like a chair. You approach it like a situation. And then the punchline. These things were cheap. Built in a shop in the Bronx for seven dollars apiece. Kiesler counted eighteen uses for one. Seven dollars. Eighteen jobs. A tiny utopian machine you could sit on. Kiesler spent the rest of his life chasing the Endless House. A house with no corners. No beginning. No end. He never got to build it. But look at this thing one more time. Curved. Continuous. No start. No finish. The Endless House never happened. The endless chair is right here. Seven bucks.