Week 3: Seating and the relationship between form and function

So to start off, I missed the point of the assignment of the seating timeline because mine did not originally address functionalism. My timeline was a collection of 5 chairs that were made from recycled materials. One is the Reee chair made from recycled video game consoles. Another is the Conolounge made of cardboard tubes left over from the newspaper printing process. The Meltdown Fleece Chairs and the Transit Chairs are similar in that they're both very straight forward about what materials were used to make them. The Meltdown Fleece Chair is made from unwanted fleece clothing and the Transit Chair is made from retired street signs. The last chair is the Cabbage Chair made from left over pleated materials from the manufaturing of textiles.

Making chairs out of recycled materials creates an interesting connection between its present form as a chair and its previous state as another object. For these chairs, form seems to be closely related to the type of material it's made from. In a way, the form of these chairs follows the function of the material. As for functional seating, it's easier to read the function of the Reee Chair and the Transit Chair as being chairs. The Conolounge and the Meltdown Fleece seemed more like sculptures than functional chairs at first glance. And the Cabbage Chair is a complete mystery at first. It ships as a roll and then only when unfolded does it reveal that it can function as a seat.

If Functionalism is interpreted as form follows function or form equals function, then why are there so many different forms for a seat? Is the most aesthetically pleasing chair the one that's most comfortable? Or the most durable? Or the most ergonomic? Or the most economic?

What I find most pleasing about these 5 chairs and what drew me to do a compilation of chairs made from recycled materials is the merging and transformation of a material from one purpose to another. And perhaps the notion of making chairs, which has a very specific purpose, from a recycled unrelated material in itself is a bit extraneous and inefficient and in opposition to the idea of efficiency in functionalism. But does this mean they're not aesthetically beautiful? I believe that even if an object's form doesn't completely follow function, it still can be appreciated and enjoyed.