Sitting Pretty

Some of furniture design's greatest hits are hiding right under Washingtonians' noses

It is a quirk of modern design that fabulous fashions are viewed on red carpets, while equally fabulous chairs perform, season after season, in the anonymity of airport lounges and laundromats.

The best designs do their job with humility, keeping bodies of all sizes stable and reasonably comfortable for minutes or hours. Especially in public spaces, where people sit, perch, slouch and straddle while they rest, these finely tuned combinations of seat, back and legs are put to the test.

The Washington area has a striking proliferation of design's greatest hits, as it turns out, hiding in plain sight. Made of wood, metal, plastic and well-worn fiberglass, they come in styles as quaint as a 19th-century bentwood bistro chair or as edgy as architect Frank Gehry's abstract cubes.

Like their famous designers, these chairs are heroes of their genre. Each one represents a milestone of stylistic evolution, technological innovation or artistic achievement -- even, in one case, social commentary.

When you sit down to think about it, that's a glorious feat.

While the oyster man opens bivalves at BlackSalt, the Palisades fish market and restaurant, climb onto an aluminum bar chair and consider the remarkable collision of submarine lore and design genius that led to the seat beneath you. This spare chair traces its lineage to the Emeco 1006, a model invented for the Navy during World War II. The seagoing chair had to be light, corrosion-resistant and tough enough to withstand torpedo hits. An engineer named Wilton C. Dinges founded the Electric Machine and Equipment Co. in Hanover, Pa., to make such chairs with a 77-step process still used at the same plant. During the war, rail cars pulled up to the factory to load tens of thousands of the chairs each year. In peacetime, the sturdy 1006 became a solid choice for prisons. Architects rediscovered "the Navy chair" in the 1990s, but it took French designer Philippe Starck's respectful update in 1999 to rev up the factory and preserve a piece of true Americana. The BlackSalt bar seat is a tall version of Starck's design. Cheap imports abound, but those engraved with "Emeco by Starck" on the back of the seat -- as these are -- carry on a tradition of Franco-American collaboration as old as Lafayette.

The classic bentwood bistro chair was the first modern, mass-produced piece of furniture. It was created in Vienna, Austria, in 1859 by Michael Thonet, who invented the essential technique for bending beechwood into standardized pieces. His brilliant method and graceful design of looped wood and sticks made the price affordable and global distribution feasible. (Chair No. 14, which was probably used at the Moulin Rouge, required just six pieces of wood, 10 screws and two washers.)

The parts proved so easy to ship that the chair made its way to Africa and South America. That explains how Robb Duncan and Violeta Edelman, owners of the Argentine ice cream parlor Dolcezza in Georgetown, encountered vintage Viennese chairs ( like the one in blue, above) at a flea market in Buenos Aires. Sweet.

The young artists of Adams Morgan, who practice their talents at the Patricia M. Sitar Center for the Arts, have not yet had a visit from Frank Gehry. But the anything-goes spirit of this world-famous architect emanates from a small, gray cube-shaped armchair that, with its matching ottoman, sits comfortably, if unexpectedly, in the children's bustling art room. The odd shapes, created in 2004, resemble worn stone monoliths more than furniture. That quality makes Gehry's first collection in plastic as radical and beautiful as his architecture. The hollow resin forms are sculpted gently to make them sitable, but their shapes echo the facades of unconventional buildings, such as the Guggenheim Bilbao or the Walt Disney Concert Hall. In the setting of the Sitar Center, they also make architecture look like child's play.

Industrial designer Karim Rashid is trying to reinvent the visual culture -- one sensuous wastebasket, soap dispenser and bar stool at a time. An early devotee of computerized design and the amorphous "blob" forms that technology makes possible, Rashid -- who last year wore a pair of pink running shoes when picking up an honorary doctorate at the Corcoran College of Art and Design -- has become a master of synthetic materials and industrial process. His seating ranges from Kool-Aid pink and green "pleasurescapes" for lounge lizards to this slightly more sedate bar stool called Bloob. The seat is a cushy, colorful polyurethane "blobject" atop a sedate chrome leg. The design, which has been ordered for the concessions area in the soon-to-open Signature Theatre in Shirlington, is sure to provide that suburb with a touch of what the designer calls "nutopia."

The transparent plastic chair on the lower level of Saks Fifth Avenue in Bethesda is a case of design stripped to essentials. The mastermind behind the piece is the contrarian French superstar Philippe Starck, who rose to the top of the design world while challenging himself for more than a decade to "make design go away." Advances in super-strong, clear and scratch-resistant poly-carbonate allowed the designer to reduce the chair to a single material. The technical wonder is called Louis Ghost, after the Versailles style the form mimics. The seat has structure and offers comfort without brocade, gilding, lumber, padding or tacks. The archetype of the Baroque ideal remains whimsically intact, but the chair is propelled into the 21st century.

Reagan National Airport was vastly improved by the 1997 addition of a terminal designed by the architect Cesar Pelli. There, beyond the long lines and security gates, past the coffee outlets and food purveyors, is a group of well-used chairs occupied by people who have little interest in sitting in them. That's the kind of setting that allows the lean, sensual Hand-kerchief Chair -- named after the seat's fluid lines, which evoke a handkerchief floating in air -- to come into its own. This 1985 design by Lella and Massimo Vignelli is stackable, cleanable, virtually indestructible and gorgeous in a minimalist way. The chair's proportions are gracious enough to accommodate all sizes, the material just springy enough, the curves in all the right places to make waiting as bearable as possible. The Vignellis earned a National Design Award in 2003 for a lifetime of brilliant work, including the Handkerchief Chair, which is also used at the Corcoran Gallery of Art's cafe.

Both poverty and luxury are embodied in the work of Fernando and Humberto Campana, Brazil's most celebrated contemporary furniture designers. They specialize in making high-end commodities from common materials such as rubber hose, string and scrap lumber. None of their furniture is more thought-provoking than the Favela Chair, a blocky 2003 sculpture inspired by the improvised wooden shelters built in the ramshackle shanties on the fringes of Sao Paulo, their hometown. Irregular pieces of Brazilian pine are nailed and glued by hand, leaving an intentionally rough and haphazard surface. As much as a chair can be, the Favela is a commentary on opulence and decay, a challenge to Western ideals of beauty as well as to South American realities. Just a year after its introduction, it was the toast of a retrospective at the London Design Museum. But you can see it at Leopold's Kafe in Georgetown.

Linda Hales is the newspaper's design critic.