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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7763 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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Like 10 years ago I used to frequently spend hours in a Starbucks, reading books or writing and getting wildly overcaffeinated.

I stopped in part because they seemed to be deliberately enshittifying the experience by replacing comfortable furniture with bare wood, and kinda making the overall vibe less inviting. Just felt like they were discouraging spending time there.

Reading this, I'm beginning to suspect why. My theory is instead of making a ballsy policy like they're doing here, they decided to just sort of passive-aggressively make the place less inviting in hopes the riffraff would stay out, of their own accord. Of course, that did not happen, but the good people stopped coming, so now it's all riffraff and no good people and the whole vibe of Starbucks is way off from what it used to be.

Somebody tell Brian Niccol to bring back the comfy chairs, maybe we can turn things back around.

Hahaha. The Bauhaus strikes again!

There was always a set of bentwood chairs,blessed by Le Corbusier, which no one ever sat in because they caught you in the small of the back like a karate chop. The dining-room table was a smooth slab of blond wood (no ogee edges, no beading on the legs), around which was a set of the S-shaped, tubular steel, cane-bottomed chairs that Mies van der Rohe had designed—the second most famous chair designedin the twentieth century, his own Barcelona chair being first, but also one of the five most disastrously designed, so that by the time the main course arrived, at least one guest had pitched face forward into the lobster bisque.

Though, in this case I guess it kind of makes sense, serving double duty to both look cool and as hostile/defensive architecture to prevent people from sitting there too long.

the second most famous chair designed in the twentieth century, his own Barcelona chair being first

The Eames chair would like to disagree. These people were so far up their own ass they didn't even notice huge developments happening at the same time as them adjacent to their own aresa. The answer these ******* would probably give is that the Eames chair was made to be comfortable, hence it had utilitarian use and was thus not suitable to be considered a work of art, making it unworthy of comparison to anything they were putting out.

Is there an objective ranking somewhere for "top five most famous chairs of the 20th century?" How would you measure that?

Don't know if there's a ranking but measurement is simple, you just show people a picture of the chair and ask them whether they know its name and then sort by most known. Can also do it the other way around where you show people the name and ask them to pick out which picture represents that chair etc.

Honestly the Herman Miller Aeron is very likely also going to beat the Barcelona chair in such a test, let alone this other "S-shaped, tubular steel, cane-bottomed chair" which I'd wager 95%+ of people wouldn't know of (even though they've probably seen it a few times in their lives). I dislike it immensely because it reminds me of sterilized metal hospital waiting room chairs (not the good private hospital types, those are more the Papa Bear Chair, but your bargain bin NHS hospitals).

My personal favourite design from that era has to be the Womb Chair though. It's extremely comfortable.

this article was published more than 43 years ago

Thank you nyt, I'd already noticed because of how funny and well written it was.

I stopped in part because they seemed to be deliberately enshittifying the experience by replacing comfortable furniture with bare wood, and kinda making the overall vibe less inviting.

Why did they think this would work, when one would imagine that homeless people aren't unfamiliar with sleeping on bare concrete?

The other reason they would replace comfortable furniture with wood is that it's cleanable, and much harder for bed bugs to hide in.

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