NoMATERIA 2020 | Balance

“Our armchair, an ancient indigenous X-shaped piece of furniture, has a surprising history.
The word itself, armchair, used universally today is cumanagota and means seat.
In the Colony, this seat shows influences coming from Europe and we still have fine
specimens. At that time, it set sail on merchant ships through the Caribbean and spread
through Mexico (butaque), Jamaica, Cuba, Louisiana (boutac) until it reached the Philippines
and Indochina through Acapulco (plantation chair).
But it is in Mexico, since the mid-twentieth century, that the armchair has been rethought
by architects such as Clara Porset or Michael Van Buuren from a perspective of industrial
production and modern aesthetics.
Porset, Cuban-Mexican educated in New York, Beaux-Arts and Black Mountain College
of North Carolina. There she meets Josef and Anni Albers, from the German Bauhaus.
Michael Van Buuren, is an American graduate of the Bauhaus and Van der Rohe’s assistant
in Chicago, residing in Mexico.
Albers falls in love with Porset’s armchair and makes his version at BM College, where
they both produced and were part of the school’s furniture. So that X cumanagota
called armchair, conquers the Caribbean, travels to Asia and ends up seducing Bauhaus
characters”.