Cantilevers pioneered by the American style of architecture & design

Looking back through some old family photos, I was reminded of how Midcentury Modern everybody's homes used to be -- not through deliberate, cultivated effort, nor as a trendoid striver affectation, but just because it is the American style, and we're Americans. So what else would our homes look like?

We may have been joined in this style by the Scandinavians (especially Denmark), Switzerland, and the Russians -- those who were outside the haute art world of the Western Euro empires that began in the Early Modern period. But we largely pioneered this style ourselves, independent of similar trends in Russia / USSR, with the Scandis and Swiss jumping on board after we got it started.

In our home was a pair of these La-Z-Boy recliners with prominent bentwood arms, much like the original Midcentury type that my grandparents had in their home, in the middle of nowhere, Appalachia. (Ours were in different colors / patterns from the links.)

Although bentwood as a fabrication process is an invention of the Austrian Empire (by Thonet), its lines in Austria were very typically European -- curvilinear, slender, airy, nothing that would have offended Rococo sensibilities. Bentwood in America took on the typical American Block Symphony approach -- mostly a right angle, with the intersection rounded off, thicker / wider pieces of wood, feeling more solid and massive, even though they're only an outline rather than a filled-in slab. This traces back to the Waterfall style of furniture from the Streamline Moderne period beginning in the '30s, and those pieces were not just skeletal outlines but Romanesque hunks of sheer volume.

Our dining table was this one by Ansager Mobler from Denmark, part of the '90s Scandinavian craze (when making a pilgrimage to Ikea became a rite of passage for the aspiring middle class). It's a contempo production, not a Midcentury original, but is fairly faithful -- only the color gives it away a bit, being more orange a la the yellow and orange tones of '80s woods (mainly oak), whereas the Midcentury would've had a bit more red in the mix. But it is teak, squared-off everywhere, clean lines, and so on and so forth.

And what other choice was there for seating at such a table than some good ol' cantilever chairs? The way the seat is only supported from below in one place (the front) makes the balancing act impressive, especially when a person's body weight is being supported, not just the seat itself. It looks like a marvel of modern engineering.

I'm pretty sure they were by Chromcraft, the major American manufacturer of cantilever dining chairs, since they also made upholstery an option, rather than only putting caning on the seat and the back. Similar to these, but with a speckled neutral earth tones fabric on both the seat and back, inside of an orange-brown wood frame, but of course with the gleaming chrome unaltered.

Chromcraft was adapting the popular Cesca chair by Bauhaus designer Marcel Breuer (Austrian) from the late '20s. It's one of only a handful of Bauhaus creations that did go on to influence America, and through America the rest of the world. Usually Bauhaus was a dead-end, the last futile gasp of moribund Euro imperial cultures -- but because these chairs used both wood frames and reed caning, they did not strike such a sterile, alienating, purely futuristic / industrial note in the audience.

America invented this overall aesthetic, primitive futurism, but if a decadent Euro movement coincided with it in a particular case, we were not going to deny them influence. Breuer's chair has fairly uniform-looking wood, in a blond color, not very primitive as the American versions would be (like the Chromcraft ones we had, in an orange-brown oak). But it's more natural than 99% of Bauhaus' output.

Fellow Bauhauser, Mies Van Der Rohe (German), designed a cantilever chair as well in the late '20s, though because it was sleek black leather and chrome, without wood / reed / etc., it did not influence America, and therefore did not influence the rest of the world. Both Breuer and Mies Van Der Rohe used cantilevers in their architecture as well around this time.

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That would seem to be the origin of cantilevered furniture, but as usual, the hype about Bauhaus proves to be overblown, one of the undying myths that status-insecure East Coast academics tell each other, and through their East Coast media pals, the rest of the country and world. That's true for the haters of Bauhaus, too -- they make it out to be a Great Satan that ushered in a latter-day fall from grace. They need it to be influential, in order to hate on it so fervently. But the haters are just as clueless.

And it traces back to the same cause -- the back-East region of America is hardly American, which has always been defined by the frontier with the Indians, beginning in the Old Northwest (Chicago) and extending out to the West Coast. East Coasters have a minimal understanding of American culture, whether they were to like it or hate it -- they just don't know what it is. How can they? They're still half-pretending to be British, rounding their low/back vowels instead of speaking like an American (unrounding them).

If it doesn't resemble some European culture, East Coasters simply cannot process it -- to them, it doesn't count as design, architecture, music, etc. Hence they over-emphasize the role that a Euro movement like Bauhaus played in America, and via America the rest of the world during the Midcentury. Most of American Modernism was native, and does not resemble Bauhaus, and therefore very little of the so-called International Style -- really, the Pax Americana style -- looks like Bauhaus either, unless the Euros had more local influence than did the Americans.

For example, South America, and Brazil in particular, had more Euro LARP-ing influence than emulation of America. We never conquered Brazil, our parent empire did not colonize Brazil, tons of elite Euros fled to Brazil after their empires' final death of WWII, and we have never controlled Brazil as a puppet regime. (Nor did we control Argentina or Chile -- those military coups may have been supported by the CIA, but were entirely endogenous affairs that would've happened and succeeded without our help.) And sure enough, there are some pretty nasty Bauhaus-y buildings in Brasilia.

But Japan bet the farm on American rather than Euro culture well before WWII, having been missionized by Frank Lloyd Wright personally. Then even more so once they were occupied by us after, their aesthetic quickly came to resemble the dominant American / Scandinavian / Soviet style, not the decadent Bauhaus / Euro style. Hardly any of their space-age electronics from the '60s and '70s came without some kind of real or simulated woodgrain, exactly in line with American primitive futurism. And when learning English, they want to know the standard American accent, not British.

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Decades before Breuer and Mies Van Der Rohe employed cantilevers in their architecture and furniture, the American Frank Lloyd Wright had already pioneered the use of dramatic cantilevered roofs in his Prairie School buildings (e.g., the Robie House from 1909). These roofs are cantilevered since they're only supported by the wall of the building, having no columns or other supports closer to the roof's edge. How do those roofs stretch out so far without falling over? They're balanced by having even more of them on top of the walled part of the home, and/or more weight attached to them in the core and less weight in the periphery.

Modern architects love showing off their engineering wizardry by using sweeping cantilevers, but it all goes back to the American Midwest around the turn of the 20th century -- not Bauhaus in the collapsed German Empire of the 1920s.

The American origin of dramatic cantilevers in whole buildings is pretty well understood. But what has so far gone unnoticed is that Americans also invented cantilevered furniture as well, including chairs.

It's true that the Bauhausers were the first to make a chair with the seat supported in the front by two "legs" (that may or may not connect into a single piece along the ground), which travel down, then back underneath the seat. This turns the support under the seat into a kind of spring, where the person's body weight pushes down on the upper horizontal plane of the support, but the horizontal part of the support along the ground resists and pushes back. The material has to have enough tension to withstand this attempt at squeezing the spring, but stainless steel has no problem with that. And so, as if by magic, the heavy person remains seemingly suspended in mid-air.

Incidentally, Knoll's website says these types are thought to be derivatives of 19th-C. rocking chairs, but none of the rocking chairs were cantilevered. Some had the usual four legs at the corners of the seat, with rocking gliders connecting the legs on each side of the seat. And the Thonet model actually has three points of contact on each side with the seat bottom -- the four corners, plus another in the middle of the side. They're anything but seemingly gravity-defying.

However, there is a whole 'nother type of chair that also uses a cantilevered support -- and in just one point, not in two points as in the Bauhaus style chair. That is the so-called swivel chair, the ancestor to nearly all office chairs today.

In a swivel chair, the vertical support column is only attached at one point to its horizontal upper support piece, which in turn is attached to the seat itself. One vertical support element, not two separate ones. It's attached near the center when viewed in profile, although closer to the back, since more body weight rests there than at the front part. The chair has to balance those two sections, a heavier back and lighter front -- and accommodate any shift in weight, like when the person leans back to rest or leans forward to hunch over their desk.

To do that, the horizontal part of the support along the ground contains both a component that goes toward the back the seat (to resist the leaning back) and toward the front of the seat (to resist the leaning forward). But since the seat swivels 360 degrees, these components must sweep around as well, to resist leaning forward or backward no matter which direction the seat is pointing. Hence, the spokes of the lower support section form a circle -- or a discrete version of one, like having 4 or 5 spokes, evenly spaced around the circle. So no matter where the seat is pointed, there are components from one or more of the spokes lying in the "resist leaning back" and "resist leaning forward" directions.

Later, the continuous version of the support base was used -- a smooth solid circle, most notably by the American Eero Saarinen's Tulip chair from the mid-'50s. That particular chair didn't have casters underneath to glide it across the floor, but its seat does swivel, and is supported in only one point like other swivel chairs. It was paired with one hell of a cantilevered table, too, to my knowledge the earliest example of a table with such a dramatic cantilever support. Less dramatic are the ones with huge blocks in below the middle of the tabletop -- the Tulip table stands on a single stem-like base!

Other larger, lounge-ier chairs for the home also employ the swivel mechanism, albeit sometimes hidden underneath the floor-length upholstery in a more trad-coded model, but left out in the open for the more mod-coded ones, e.g. the Eames lounge chair and ottoman (both). The cantilevered nature of the support for swivel chairs is kept open to highlight the machine-age wonders of "wow, how did they engineer that magical balancing act? All that weight, leaning forward, backward, shifting side to side -- all balancing on that one tiny little point!"

With all due respect to the dual-column cantilever chairs, including my beloved childhood dining chairs, the single-column cantilever chair is a greater example of modern engineering marvels.

And it's also older! American president Thomas Jefferson invented a swivel chair for personal use, but this did not spawn any copies of itself. Around 1850, the American Thomas Warren invented and produced (through the American Chair Company) the Centripetal Spring Armchair, which does everything relevant here that a swivel chair does, including rest on one, not two, vertical support elements. I've found very little evidence that this chair was at all popular in its own day, and apparently vanished into oblivion within a few decades. It left no direct copies.

Both of those early examples were a case of "right idea, wrong time" -- because American ethnogenesis has not entered its "defining new things for ourselves" phase, which happens after an integrative civil war, where who "we" are is up for grabs. Is it the one Us, or the other Us? During the initial rise of an empire, we are only defining ourselves against our meta-ethnic nemesis, in our case the Indians (and somewhat later, the Spanish / Mexicans). Our Civil War & Reconstruction Era ends in the 1870s, so distinctive American ethnicity does not really take shape until after then.

If Warren had introduced his chair 50 years later, it would've been a smash hit. But before the integrative civil war, we were still holding ourselves to Euro antecedent standards -- and no European created a swivel chair. If it was too outre for the Euros, it was sadly also not going to find much success here because we were still insecure about being ourselves.

But as fate would have it, an American architect and designer from the Midwest began working around the turn of the 20th century, and wouldn't you know it? -- Frank Lloyd Wright himself invented the modern office chair, for use in the Larkin Administration Building which he also designed, in 1904.

His swivel model streamlined the several large springs of Warren's earlier model, was made entirely of metal (aside from a simple seat covering -- unlike Warren's more elaborate upholstery). And it was made in an angular style appropriate for American Block Symphony, to distinguish America from serpentine-curvy Europe. The only problem was one of degree rather than kind -- the footprint of the base is too narrow, so it was able to tip over if someone leaned too far. But that was fixed with subsequent swivel chairs.

Although there are several additional vertical support elements, they are not attached to the bottom of the seat -- they all converge in the center toward the top, and it's still just one point of support at the top of the vertical section.

Wright also designed an entirely separate type of cantilever office chair for this building, which was demolished in 1950 by traitorous back-East scum (Buffalo, NY), who could not appreciate American culture even when it was handed to them on a silver platter. Sadly most or all of this second type were then thrown in the dump after.

It's an integrated desk-and-chair combo, as seen in this example and in this gallery (Fig. 6, "Type B desk"). There's only one vertical support element, roughly in the middle of the seat bottom, and two horizontal elements (a higher and a lower one) take it back to the desk, where they attach to a vertical piece along the inner side of the desk. It doesn't fall over because the counterweight is the huge hulking desk that it's attached to by tense metal supports -- and the distance is pretty close, no more than a few feet, so there's no torque that could bend the seat down, let alone overturn it.

Very much like the roof extending out over the wall of the heavy bulky core of a home -- even if you jumped up and down on the edge of the roof, or sat on it, or hanged from it, it wouldn't come crashing down.

The seat back can fold forward to a horizontal position, too, so that the chair can be fully stored underneath the desk when not in use. Neat idea! Not that much of a space-saver, though, and it meant that the chair could never be moved anywhere away from its desk-twin. So this model didn't go anywhere, as far as office or home furniture goes.

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Let's return to the non-swiveling cantilever chairs. You can't deny that they have a more dynamic look, the way the back seems to be left in the dust by the front support -- since there is no direct support in the back. The "front to back" contrast is normally not that dynamic in a chair, and using the cantilever in this way does give it an industrial / machine-age speed and energy to it, even though it's a perfectly stationary object for a person who will be sitting perfectly still in it.

The swivel chairs, although more magical in their support, have the support closer to the center rather than the front or back, so they appear more stationary and harmonious, not like the driver of a speeding car with a stark back-to-front arrow.

Outside of Bauhaus, Finnish architect & designer Alvar Aalto created a non-swivel cantilever chair in 1930, only two years after Breuer and three after Mies Van Der Rohe. He went on in the '30s to create even more variations on this theme, with large lounge types for the home. These latter improve on the speed theme by disconnecting the lower horizontal supports from each other around the back -- this puts even more of the structure in the front, and makes the lower supports look like skies that are taking the sitter on a race across the snow.

And unlike Bauhaus, they were made of wood, although they did not mix wood and chrome a la the American style. But that at least made them influential worldwide, fitting with the American inclusion of wood, as opposed to Bauhaus' general aversion to wood.

America's seminal designer (who was not also an architect), Gilbert Rohde, took over creative control of Herman Miller in the '30s, and had an exhibit at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, which served as a launch pad for primitive futurism (in the new form of Streamline Moderne). He made a whole bunch of cantilevered seating, and it's hard to tell when each one came out. But as early as 1935, he'd already made a chair, as well as a stool around the same time. Earlier, at the '33 Fair, he debuted a lamp and clock with cantilever support.

During the '30s, he added to the "how did they balance all that weight?" theme by making the seats themselves massive and bulky -- no need for a person to sit in them to make you scratch your head. The chair on its own seemed to defy gravity, unlike the Bauhaus designs that were light and delicate unto themselves, in typical Euro fashion.

I already mentioned Eero Saarinen's heavily, but centered, cantilevered Tulip series, which brought the concept to tables. That was from the mid-'50s.

The next development was to switch where the vertical supports were -- from the front to the back, making it seem to want to lean forward. There's a Danish Modern desk in teak by Georg Petersens Mobelfabrik like this, which everyone attributes to the '60s without any evidence. And American designer extraordinaire Milo Baughman did this with all sorts of seating -- club chairs, loveseats, entire sofas, desks, etc. -- possibly also in the '60s or the '70s at the latest, again without any hard evidence of the timing. (He'd already done the "support in front, seeming to lean back" style earlier.)

These seem to be the ancestors of today's cantilever side tables that every big box store sells (supported in the back, seeming to lean forward, with the empty space in front allowing the tabletop to slide over some other piece of furniture). In any case, not something that traces back to Bauhaus, but to America, perhaps with input from our fellow non-collapsed-Euro-empire friends in Scandinavia.

Bauhaus did pioneer a certain style of cantilever chair, but had already been beaten to the punch by Frank Lloyd Wright when it comes to cantilevers in whole buildings, as well as seating (albeit in the form of the swivel chair, and the separate desk-and-chair combo). And they clearly weren't as obsessed with cantilevers as the Americans were, who put it to use in everything as soon as they could -- stools, clocks, lamps, ottomans, entire sofas, then tables, desks, anything really. It's more definitive of the American-led style (with help from the Scandis to define the culture of the post-Age-of-Euro-Empires era).

Americans may not have invented sculpture or discovered contrapposto, but we did pioneer and perfect the same basic principle as applied to buildings and all other designed objects, shocking a sense of energy, movement, and dynamism into what would otherwise be a stationary, inert, dead hunk of matter, and in a way that seems to defy the laws of nature. Not just a slight overhang of a roof above an outer wall, but in a sweeping, dramatic, engineering wizardry kind of way. And our building-sculptures and object-sculptures are no less artistic or aesthetic just cuz they don't represent natural kinds like people, animals, plants, and so on. Abstract art is no less artistic than figurative art.