The Windsor chair

My friend Rick builds Windsor chairs, among other things.



He was telling me the other day about how the design of the Windsor chair evolved over generations to maximize strength, flexibility, and lightness, given the constraints of the wood they are made from. For example, the spindles and legs are hardwood, but the seat is pine or poplar, so that if stressed the joints will flex and the seat won't split. Since the woods are mixed, then, traditional Windsors are painted. What's more, the spindles are riven, not sawn. To rive means to split wood along the grain. By contrast, sawing wood results in grain exiting the spindle at points other than the ends, which results eventually in split spindles. Factory-produced Windsors have heavier spindles to compensate.



Here, then, is a clear example of a design, which initially evolved within the constraints of the material, evolving further as technology transcends those constraints. Traditional Windsor chair makers past and present strove and strive to make their riven spindles uniform. Power saws now render this goal trivial to attain, but at the expense of lightness and durability. Rick prefers not to shape his spindles too much, precisely to emphasize the fact that his spindles are not sawn.

What's more interesting is that the Windsor chair was a middle class chair 150 years ago. For a Windsor today, Rick quoted me $400, and the Thos. Moser version lists at $1275. So while the Windsor design is clearly more beautiful and humanizing in its mastery of its constraints, middle class people today barely even have the option of sitting in one regularly. Instead we are strongly pressured to buy disembodied hunks of birch for $79.99.



Isn't that an impoverishment? Feed back to Chad Whitacre.