A Chair for All Seasons

In 2010, in a preview of the Milan Furniture Fair, design critic Alice Rawsthorn asked: “Does the world need another chair?” When she asked the question, Jonathan Olivares had already embarked on a two-part answer: his book A Taxonomy of Office Chairs, published by Phaidon Press in 2011, and his chair in die-cast and extruded aluminium, introduced by Knoll at NeoCon in Chicago in June 2012. Olivares’s six-year-old award-winning practice is called Jonathan Olivares Design Research for a reason, as the two projects informed each other and resulted in a colourful, technically advanced, indoor/outdoor stackable seat the world might actually need.