Chair Anatomy reveals in photos and illustrations the form and the construction details – the anatomy – of a selection of fifty chairs chosen from the last 150 years of modern chair design. It also introduces the designers behind these chairs, their backgrounds and their routes to creating the chairs. In reducing chairs to their constituent parts, the book gets to the heart of each design: how pieces are designed and produced to fit together; why a certain material imparts a certain quality, functional advance or comfort level; and how the chair’s structure can withstand stress while being elegant and economical to produce. In short, a chair is architecture in miniature.

‘Exploding’ these chairs gives insight into the careful and detailed thinking that has gone into a piece of furniture that we take for granted, and offers designers and students, in a single reference source, a truly nuts-and-bolts perspective on masterpieces of design.