Chair play

Most design exhibitions tout objects intended for everyday use but forbid visitors to touch them. “Konstantin Grcic: Decisive Design,” which opened this week in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing, invites you to sit on Grcic’s creations—if you dare.

The German designer’s slim, cantilevered Myto chair (2008, manufactured by Plank with BASF) doesn’t appear strong enough to hold our weight. It’s two-tenths of an inch at its thinnest point, according to the exhibition catalog—which assures us the high-tech plastic chair can support 470 pounds. Myto sits on a large rubber oval that’s ringed by tires and Grcic’s Mayday lamps (1998) for Flos, which were inspired by Formula One mechanics’ hanging lights. “We’ve come up with our own mini racing track,” curator Zoë Ryan says. Instead of the fast cars Grcic loves, however, visitors test-drive the designer’s iconic chairs, including the Landen (2007), commissioned by Vitra, which resembles a lunar module, and the new 360? office chair (made by Magis), which is stranger still.

Ryan—the Art Institute’s first design curator—observed the 360? chair’s refinement when she visited Grcic’s small Munich studio in fall 2008. “It’s the oddest thing,” she says. “When you see it, you think, My God, how am I supposed to sit on that?” But Grcic (pronounced “gritch-itch”) had put a lot of research and thought into his design. “He was thinking, when you have a bad back, you should move around a lot,” so it’s not intended to be entirely comfortable, Ryan explains. “The other thing he was saying is, there are jobs in which you aren’t static all the time.… In the studio, when he was bouncing from desk to desk, I could see it working.”

The curator first noticed Grcic several years ago, when her then-boyfriend brought home a Mayday lamp. “It was hanging on a door and I just couldn’t stop looking at it. It was so unusual,” Ryan recalls. “It was so useful because you could unhook it and move it around. You could have it on the floor or on the bed while you’re reading.”

Grcic’s commitment to rethinking the ways we interact with everyday objects led Ryan to propose the designer’s first exhibition in the U.S. It took him a while to warm to the idea. “He’s always been asked to curate his work himself. That’s anathema to the way we work,” Ryan says. “I wanted to add a level of critical dialogue, give an overview of his career, but really focus on the last five years, when he’s become much more ambitious.”

Ryan refers to Grcic’s reputation for mastering cutting-edge materials and manufacturing processes, which evolved more gradually than his flair for creating innovative forms. He trained as a cabinetmaker at Parnham College in Dorset, England, before earning a master’s degree in industrial design from London’s Royal College of Art. (After a visa snafu exiled him from London, he opened his own studio in his hometown of Munich in 1991.)

A second, no-touching-allowed section of “Decisive Design” traces the history of Grcic’s practice with a display of products, drawings and models that hugs the gallery walls. Acquisitions and donations have given the Art Institute the largest collection of Grcic’s work of any museum in the world. Ryan says she wants to show visitors “all the hurdles and problems” designers overcome to prepare a concept for mass production.

Yet Grcic is “not afraid to make projects people won’t like,” Ryan says. “He knows that a lot of times, when you produce something new, it’s like art: Our immediate reaction is, ‘I’m not used to this.’ But over time, we live with these things and they’re subsumed into our culture. He wants to create that friction, and that’s what I admire.”

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