Not Made to Sit

A new book suggests that humans were not created to sit. The skeleton structure supports running, walking and lying down. But sitting — not so much.

Most of us spend more time sitting in chairs than thinking about chairs, but perhaps we devote even more time to hunting for the perfect chair. Now there's a whole book about that pursuit. It's titled Now I Sit Me Down and it's written by architect Witold Rybczynski (Rib-shin-skee).

He refers to chairs --

+ used in ancient Greece called klismos, which had a curved backrest and tapering, out-curved legs;

+ the yokeback chair of the Song dynasty (960-1279), which included one of the earliest uses of lumbar support;

+ the modern ergonomic desk chair;

+ the rocking chair that famously helped alleviate President Kennedy's back issues;

+ and the dentist recliner that made it easier to treat cavities.


Rybczynski explains that the history of chairs is a social history -- of different ways of sitting, of changing manners and attitudes and of varying tastes. He notes that the ancient Chinese switched from sitting on the floor to sitting in a chair, and how the iconic chair of Middle America -- the...