Radical Sitting

In a photographic series, Czech collective Okolo presents an illustrated booklet with a timeline of lesser known examples of 20th century seats.

Radical Sitting, Hidden Experiments in Seating Furniture 1900 - 1990 is an illustrated booklet by Czech collective Okolo, featuring a timeline of some of the lesser known, interesting experiments in 20th century seating furniture. The project was created for the SEATS 05 exhibition at Depot Basel, in Switzerland.

In this photographic series, the collective partnered with photographer Jaroslav Moravec and Prague's Vitra showroom, where they shot this series of pictures of the booklet amidst the Vitra miniature collection. The resulting images present surreal compositions, in which miniature chairs support the lesser known icons of 20th century design included in the book.

"The Radical Sitting, Hidden Experiments in Seating Furniture 1900 – 1990 booklet brings together a time axis of 25 various pieces of seating furniture from the whole world," write Okolo in the booklet's introduction. "Chairs, armchairs, stools, chaise longues, and sofas tell stories of designers and artists and their perpetual urge to experiment and make formal or functional innovations in the field of sitting. Thus, our selection introduces clear historical contexts into the current exhibition project by the Depot Basel gallery and strives to present lesser known designer works, which not only enrich our knowledge in the field of applied arts, but also stir inspiration in contemporary designers who look for the new, undiscovered, unconventional, and experimental as their predecessors did. Our selection could certainly include a myriad of other brilliant designs that are probably more famous than the ones presented here. However, our selection deliberately concentrates on less commonplace designs. Apart from other things, we wish to demonstrate the fact that designer innovation has not always been in the hands of the most renowned iconic designers, as one might conclude from the current interpretation of the development of design."