'TASTING' TWO CHAIRS

On a visit to COPE's Shetland Home Co., the recycling centre in Lerwick set up to support those with a disability, we came upon a chair that had an immediate impact. Just why it caught the eye was not clear, but it did. There was something authoritative about this piece of furniture.

Shetland Home Co., Lerwick.

The chair was picked up and inspected - one can tell a lot from the underside of a chair. Was this a cheap mock up of an antique; might it be the original; perhaps a recent replica? There was no plywood used in the fabrication of this piece, but it did not seem to be an original antique. There were no markings to identify either brand or age on the chair. Being made from solid timbers with a seat glued up from at least two pieces, this spindle backed chair with a centre decorative piece and a braced back was finally assessed as a good quality replica: so we happily purchased it. It would make a very nice addition to the two original Shetland chairs we already had at our small dining room table.

We were pleased with this modest discovery that remained a delight to peruse. Why had we not been aware of this particular style of chair?

True to Jung's theory of synchronicity, the same chair was seen in a bar scene on a television programme only a day or two later. It was identical in every way apart from a slight variation in the decorative profiling of the centre panel that had the dominant wheel motif that seemed to define this item.

Being interested in knowing more about our chair, we turned to Google. It took no time at all to have our chair confirmed as a replica ‘wheelback’ Windsor chair. The chairs were still being made in beech, with stains of just about any colour one could want. The original antique chairs were illustrated in a variety of styles and sizes, varying from high-back versions to doll's house miniatures. It seemed to be a classic antique. The most obvious clue to gauging the age of the chair seemed to be the profile of the decorative cut-out that had an angular outline in the top when old, and a 'U'-shaped opening when new - available for about 120 pounds each as a new solid timber replica.

Child's chair.

Child's highchair.

High-back arm chair.

Versions with unusual variations in the leg design.

This was all very interesting. One wondered why one was not more familiar with this chair. We remained pleased with our 14 pound purchase that stood very nicely at the table, admirably catching the eye of the passer-by with its easy rigour.

Being interested in knowing more about what seemed to be the core decorative theme in these chairs, the wheel pattern, Google was again approached. The explanation was that this motif was a reference to the origin of the chair's craftsmanship, the wheelwright. It seemed so logical: the chair did indeed use all of the elements of the wheel, with its core solid ‘hub’ seat, fitted with spokes as legs and a back, with the legs stabilised with extra struts, and the back held by an outer bent timber rim. The chair was a wheel in a different mode: the decoration recorded this beginning.

But Jung kept with us: a few weeks later when visiting my sister, I noticed a chair we had not seen in her apartment before. It was the same wheelback Windsor chair with angular cut-outs, but an unbraced back. After my wife's comment that we had picked up an identical chair just the other day, (well nearly the same; this was merely conversational chit-chat), my sister said that she had been given three, but only needed one: we could have the other two if we liked. 

We paused to consider: did we have space? We decided that one could pair with the replica chair we had at the table, with the other to be used as a sewing chair. We happily put the two chairs into the car. One fitted nicely at the table, on the vacant fourth side, while the other went upstairs to replace the 1950's pine chair at the sewing machine.

Whether it was ordinary force of habit or something else, when sitting at the dining room table, we continued to use the two original Shetland side chairs. These were made in a manner similar to the Windsor chair, but were fitted with a basic ladder back with two horizontal rungs. The two Windsor chairs sitting on the left and right could be casually enjoyed in detail each time we sat at the table.

One day my wife commented that the unbraced chair was a much nicer chair than the braced replica we had purchased. One looked again, and agreed. While being almost exact copies apart from the braced back and the decorative profiling, the chairs had a starkly different presence. One wondered why this was so, when the size, style and detailing were the same. Surely age would not have such an impact.

Each chair had been made in an identical fashion, (ignoring the bracing addition), and both had used solid timber. It was not as though there was any guile in the fabrication, with plywood being used for the seating mass and the curved back to facilitate a faster and cheaper manufacturing process; so there must have been something else creating this difference that grew in intensity the more one compared the two chairs.

The legs were nearly identically profiled and braced, but there was a difference. The profiles of the older chair were more acute, terminating in sharper, well-considered and controlled returns and changes in shape, giving a clearer and crisper, more expressive, impressive appearance to the turnings. Then one noticed the little imperfections in the older work; the leg shapings varied very slightly, having all been made to a pattern by a hand that might have exerted just a little more or less force here and there; and one noticed a variation in a location of a swelling from time to time, giving minute differences obvious only to the measuring, comparative eye, a distinctiveness that appeared to add some life to the piece that had been touched by another's care and skill.

The replica chair's legs offered what appeared to be the identically profiled turnings, but as a matching set of four perfectly formed struts. The random touch of the hand had gone, with the machine capable of producing leg after perfect leg, all managed by a predetermined pattern or a programme. 

Similarly one noticed slight variations in the bracing struts of the legs and spindles on the older chair that were not in the replica, with one piece a little fatter; another a little thinner. While there seemed to be no difference in the styling of the two chairs - both were made true to the same standard pattern - there seemed to be a subtle, but significant discrepancy in intent that lay in the intimacy of the making. One process directly engaged the mind and body as the guide; the other manipulated machines to achieve the replicated outcome.

This disparity could be seen most obviously in the central, decorative panel rather than in the finer subtleties of minute, ad hoc dissimilarities. In the older panel, all the cut-outs had sharp, angular intersections where the fretsaw had terminated and varied the direction of the freehand movement of the cut which revealed all of its imperfections in the subtle differences and divergences seen in the nearly straight lines and approximately even curves. In the replica, the continuity of the profiling of the router gave all intersections and various angles a radius, and all curves a perfection that explained the preferred 'U' form at the top of the panel instead of the 'V' - it suited the machine.

The new 'wheel' reads like a cut orange.

The old 'wheel' has all the characteristics of a wheel.

This difference had nothing to do with the Arts and Crafts philosophy that criticised the 'horrid' machine with a certain neurotic, romantic determination that referenced  preferred processes of past times. The differences being identified merely illustrated how the necessity of the machine can have an impact on any pure, honest intent and concerted effort such as to change circumstances with seemingly insignificant, but defining, transformative outcomes.

Given this circumstance, one has to worry about the impact of AI housing on habitation; and of the influence of 3D printing on our everyday items: how might experience be modified by these interventions?

Nor could the eye could miss the variation in the ‘hub’ of the chair - the seat. The older chair had a profile and patina that can only come with age, revealing a beautiful grained, worn pattern in one solid piece of timber; but the dissimilarity was not only in time and use. The seat of the newer chair, on close inspection, was found to have been fabricated from four pieces of solid timber glued together as quarters to give a pretend whole. The change in what might seem to be a mere detail was significant. Even though the patchy grain patterns in the replica seat had been cleverly disguised with a dark stain, the seat would never age to give the wholeness and integrity of the patina revealed in the one piece of timber that had been more carefully profiled for the comfort of sitting than the minimal, efficient shaping of the new seat.

We had two completely different chairs that were so much the same.

One wondered if the replica had chosen to use the braced back detail - a lovely solution for more solidity - in order to remove the necessity for the quality craftsmanship required in the fitting of the unbraced back, which would have needed the wheelwright's expertise and attention to ensure the assembly could provide the support and rigidity the seat had to provide over time. Did the replica lack the certainty of touch needed to achieve the exact fit, with each subtle variation, even with a machine, needing to be assessed by mind, eye, and hand to ensure the right adjustment for an enduring performance?

One again is confronted with the Arts & Crafts critique which argues that the human touch has essential value that is lost with machines, leaving one feeling like a crank, ( c.f. Schumacher’s definition: a bent object that gets things going), when there is an array of serious, sensitive matters that need to be addressed. Are we being romantically nostalgic about old items, or are we truly missing something vital to our being in these machined differences? One ponders traditional art - rich, vital, and essential - and again asks if we have let machines change us, transforming us into something bland and fuzzy with our blind enthusiasm; something only seemingly wonderful in spite of our best intentions. Nasr notes how modernity blurs meanings:

If traditionalists insist on the complete opposition between  tradition and modernism, it is precisely because the very nature of modernism creates in the religious and metaphysical realms a blurred image within which half truths appear as the truth itself and the integrity of all that tradition represents is thereby compromised.

Sayyed Hossein Nasr Traditional Islam in the Modern World Kegan Paul International London 1987 p.14.

Might Modernism also blur perceptions in other traditional fields? The old question of religion remains relevant: What must we do?

It seems that one has to wonder about and interrogate the impacts of machine learning and AI, and become aware of the implications rather than remain excited about a fantastic future that may not hold everything that the idea of progress might appear to promise.

As I type, my son gives me an espresso coffee to taste; it is truly delicious; uniquely flavoursome, unlike any coffee encountered previously. He explains that with most coffees one tastes the roasting process, not the bean. Here all the flavours of the bean have been exposed. He had always wondered how coffee experts could talk about truly tasty, fruity, chocolatey coffees, thinking that this was just pretentious twaddle. He has now discovered how this experience is a real possibility with the careful growing and roasting of a selected bean that comes from a single source, from a named grower, and with the coffee knowingly and fondly, precisely prepared and poured by those who foster taste.

Perhaps this is the difference between the two chairs: with the old chair, one tastes the bean with all of its rich variations, while the replica chair reveals only the distinctively bland roasting: yet both are ‘coffee': a wheelback Windsor chair.

Seen in this context, the challenge to embody the clarity of subtlety and depth - vitality - in our world remains a true task that has to be mastered so as to reveal the essence of the bean - the core of meaning - and not have these qualities blurred by the impacts of process or method - the roasting. It is of interest to note that tradition recorded the experience of things subtle and ephemeral as immediate, certain, essential; as complex and inexplicable: as 'taste.'

We eventually decided to swap the chairs around, delegating the replica to the sewing room, leaving us to admire the 'taste' of integrity of the pair at the table.

NOTE: All images have been taken from Google Images and show chairs similar to those discussed to illustrate the text.

P.S 

In his writings, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright expressed his enthusiasm for machines, believing that they could finally give perfection to workmanship by doing away with the 'freehand' outcomes of handicraft work.

Alas, Modernity's drive to support the lowest common denominator has meant that the machine has been used to provide outcomes faster and easier, more simply and with less effort, under the guise of efficiency, resulting in workmanship that is shaped by a concentration on the ease of production and the maximising of profits, rather than ambitions for any particular concept and clarity of expression, any 'perfection' in the product.

The ideals of today are comfort, expediency, surface knowledge, disregard for one’s ancestral heritage and traditions, catering to the lowest standards of taste and intelligence, apotheosis of the pathetic, hoarding of material objects and possessions, disrespect for all that is inherently higher and better — in other words a complete inversion of true values and ideals, the raising of the victory flag of ignorance and the banner of degeneracy.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/46407.Seyyed_Hossein_Nasr

24 AUGUST 25

NOTE

Two recent articles raise issues with AI that really just scratch the surface of its pertinence. One considers cultural matters; the other has to do with AI’s rigour. It has to be remembered that AI is merely a logical mathematical matter that uses nothing more than a matching process that assembles words and shapes to the rules that have been formulated by the numbers. It only holds the authority and reputation that we choose to give it. Even beyond the issues discussed in these articles, there is the matter of the impacts that AI is having/will have on our experience generally; our being; on how we view the world and its mysteries: ordinary existence that is extraordinary.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-23/calls-to-protect-indigenous-intellectual-property-from-ai-cultur/105680182

and

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/aug/20/wa-lawyer-referred-to-regulator-after-preparing-documents-with-ai-generated-case-citations-that-did-not-exist-ntwnfb

The concern is that AI is now the basis of the new machine age; the new machines that are coming between us, our actions and the world: consider CAD and smart glasses amongst an array of other gadgets that we now use to produce items, to communicate, and to understand and interpret our environment.

One has to ask: if the fairly basic tools used to make two apparently identical chairs can make such a difference in outcomes in the little things, what might AI be capable of as a tool?