Ingrid Peschke - the Christian Science Sentinel, Feb. 19, 2007
You’ve undoubtedly sat on one in your life. Ultra compact, lightweight, sleek, and economical, David Rowland’s “40/4” stackable chair put the exclamation point on his career as a designer. His chair can be found in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the permanent collection of the Palais du Louvre in Paris, at the Bauhaus School in Dessau, Germany, and countless other public locations worldwide.
After studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan—which famous American architects/designers Charles and Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen also attended—David moved to a closet-sized room in New York City in the early 1950s. There he spent every free moment honing his chair design, while working two other jobs.
“A gentleman at the Christian Science church I attended would always ask me what I was up to,” David says. “And I’d respond, ‘I’m working on my chair.’ ” The man asked David that question for eight years, and his answer was always the same. “I think he thought I was loony,” he says.
But in 1964, David’s chair was awarded the coveted Gran Prix at the Milan Triennale (an international exhibition that showcased and honored emerging design quality). David’s chair was considered the best piece of engineering in the United States at that time. Ever since then, the chair has held on to its status as one of the most commercially successful contract chairs ever produced.
“In October 1964, my chair made the front page of The New York Times because of the Milan award. My friend at church approached me with the newspaper in his hand and said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were working on such a great chair?’ I think he was a bit shocked!”
The “40/4,” so named because a stack of 40 chairs measures four feet high, has endured the varying design demands of each decade, meeting ergonomic requirements, space-saving needs, and even environmental awareness issues. In many ways, the qualities this chair came to represent—persistence, patience, sturdy resolve, timelessness, endurance, and intelligence—describe the spiritual journey David took to develop and execute his design.
Raised a Christian Scientist, David remembers the first healing through prayer that he experienced on his own at the age of five. “I had a headache. But I decided I wouldn’t let it keep me from working in my little vegetable garden. So I sat down and thought about the Lord’s Prayer and Mrs. Eddy’s spiritual interpretation of it.” He says when he finished the prayer—which ends with “For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. For God is infinite, all-power, all Life, Truth, Love, over all, and All” (Science and Health, p. 17)—he reached for a shovel to begin gardening. At that moment, he remembers clearly, the headache left. “I wasn’t about to let a material condition get in the way of what it was my duty to do.”
This same line of spiritual reasoning applies to his successful completion of the 40/4 chair. “When I moved to New York City, I was working toward the thought that I had to succeed, because my father was about to retire from his job with a nonprofit museum and he had no pension. I wanted to help provide for my parents.” So when he got the initial idea to design a chair, he saw it as divine guidance and stuck to it, despite the various obstacles that came his way—and there were plenty. Listening to his story is a bit like hearing a modern-day rendition of the Old Testament story of Nehemiah rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem.
David began building prototypes of his chair—more than 30 of them—over a period of eight years. The big question for him was, how was he going to attract interest in it and launch it in the public sector? “I knew of a woman, who’d gone to my school and who was in charge of the interior design section of one of the leading modern furniture design companies in the world. So I decided to show her my design,” he says. “But she turned me down six times, with each successive design model I showed her.” But this didn’t deter David. After much prayer, he says, he finally decided he had to make her an offer she couldn’t resist. “I remember a hot Sunday afternoon thinking and praying about it. Suddenly the thought came to me, ‘Hey, why don’t you see how many chairs you can get into a small space?’ Then I thought I couldn’t just make a small model. I needed two full-sized chairs to show how they stacked.” Up to that time, casual chairs could only stack about four high. David’s would be the first chair that could stack more than that and still be comfortable.
As he worked on two full-sized prototypes, David wondered whether he should consult with a respected expert about his idea. “I asked Edgar Kaufmann Jr., who at that time was the head of Architecture and Design of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.” Kaufmann was something of a design-aficionado, the son of a great Pennsylvania merchant family whose weekend home was Fallingwater, the famous home designed by renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright. “As I sat opposite Kaufmann, I told him about my idea to get chairs to stack 40 in a height of four feet. He looked me straight in the eye and told me there was no market for that in the United States. He knew about marketing and I trusted him. But here he was, saying my chair was a bad idea.”
While he took Kaufmann’s opinion seriously, David again asked himself where the original idea for his chair had come from. “My only answer was that the idea came from God,” he says, “not from Edgar Kaufmann Jr., or my furniture design friend, or anyone else. And if it came from God, then I thought I’d better fight for it.” So fight he did. Soon, he’d finished his two sample chairs and presented them to his furniture friend. He says, “She sat on it, got up, and in seconds said, ‘We’ll take it!’ Her company offered me $20,000 for the rights to the chair.”
While David admits it was tempting to take that money and run, prayer guided him away from that decision. “I remember thinking that God’s ideas always sustain you, and this was an idea from God. I saw that if I just took a little bit per chair, rather than a large amount of money upfront, I would be able to go on for years—and take care of my parents.”
Although he turned down that offer, the company still wanted to produce the chair. But in the months that followed, he found that a group of designer employees at the company were working against him, behind his back. “They were supposed to be getting my chair ready for production, and yet they were against the company’s acceptance of it,” he says. “After six months, they had a meeting and said the chair didn’t snap together side by side as I’d designed it (they hadn’t preserved that feature). So I got a letter canceling the contract.”
Another setback. But as David prayed about God’s expression of Himself as divine Principle—honest, orderly, punctual, complete—he decided it was very important for him not to take offense. He also remembers keeping his thoughts focused on these lines from one of Mrs. Eddy’s poems:
Love looseth thee, and lifteth me, Ayont hate’s thrall: There Life is light, and wisdom might, And God is All. (“Satisfied,” Poems, p. 79)
A short time later, David attended an office furniture exhibition in the New York Coliseum. He recalls: “I ran into the national sales manager for that same furniture company that had turned me down. But instead of avoiding him, it came to me to extend my hand and say hello.” As they got into conversation, the man suggested David call on Skidmore, Owings and Merill, a large, international, prestigious architecture firm, to see if they’d be interested in his chair design. Expressing kindness instead of resentment, truly endeavoring to demonstrate Jesus’ law of loving his neighbor as himself, David says he paved a route for his chair through that architecture firm. “I called them, and it turned out they were working on a university campus design and needed 16,000 of my chairs!” This provided enough money to pay for the manufacturing. And, also important to David, was the fact that this firm was approaching the chair as a work of art—not just a functional object.
Sales of the 40/4 stackable chair have continued for 43 years, with over a million sold. The first year’s production tallied up to 50,000 just in the United States alone, ten times what the original company had planned for. And after he received the Milan award, a deluge of requests for the chair came in from Europe. This was unprecedented; up to then, European furniture usually came to the US, not vice versa.
Although his father passed away before the chair was produced, David was able to provide for his mother in her retirement.
A man, a prayer, an idea. David’s story echoes something Mrs. Eddy wrote in Science and Health: “Spiritual sense, contradicting the material senses, involves intuition, hope, faith, understanding, fruition, reality” (p. 298). He went on to design numerous other chairs for mass production. Today he continues to work on creative, groundbreaking design ideas. But his 40/4 chair remains unsurpassed, the centerpiece of a life-work and the symbol of a man who took an idea from God and went with it.
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