Of all the things we buy, with the exception of our clothes, furniture is the most intimate, the one item we spend most time in contact with. According to JG Ballard who dedicated himself to understanding our relationship with the world around us, ‘Furniture constitutes an external constellation of our skin areas and body postures’. Whether he would have recognised it as such, Ballard was a pioneer of the principle we now refer to as psychogeography, defined by one of its founders, Guy Debord, as ‘the study of the precise effects of setting, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behaviour of the individual’. Psychogeography may have originally been about the manipulation of the aesthetic and political, as part of the Situationist movement of the Fifties, but the idea appeals to our ongoing fascination with the relationship between people and workplaces.
When the chairs took over the world and what it all meant