His prose has the engagingly conversational tone of an accomplished lecturer.

Maybe you'll even find the one you're sitting in reflected in its pages: 'Now I Sit Me Down' is charmingly illustrated with postage-stamp-size images of many of the chairs discussed-all drawn with obvious care by the author.' -Henry Petroski, The Wall Street Journal 'Rybczynski adds another delightful volume to an already impressive shelf of books notable for formidable learning worn lightly and an infectious fascination with the way we craft the built environment. 'This is a book to savor in a favorite chair. The famous Danish furniture designer Hans Wegner once remarked, 'A chair is only finished when someone sits in it.' As Rybczynski tells it, the way we choose to sit and what we choose to sit on speak volumes about our values, our tastes, and the things we hold dear. And he pairs these stories with his own delightful hand-drawn illustrations: colonial rockers and English cabrioles, languorous chaise longues and no-nonsense ergonomic task chairs-they're all here. Rybczynski weaves a rich tapestry that draws on art and design history, personal experience, and historical accounts. We learn how the ancient Chinese switched from sitting on the floor to sitting in a chair, and how the iconic chair of Middle America-the BarcaLounger-traces its roots back to the Bauhaus. Thehistory of chairs is the history of who we are. He reveals the history of chairs to be a social history-of different ways of sitting, of changing manners and attitudes, and of varying tastes.

He tells the stories of the inventor of the bentwood chair, Michael Thonet, and of the creators of the first molded-plywood chair, Charles and Ray Eames. A grand tour of the chair through the ages by our foremost writer on design Have you ever wondered where rocking chairs came from, or why cheap plastic chairs are suddenly everywhere? In Now I Sit Me Down, the distinguished architect and writer Witold Rybczynski chronicles the history of the chair from the folding stools of pharaonic Egypt to the ubiquitous stackable monobloc chairs of today.

City life witold rybczynski