Halloween means many things to many people. For kids, its the opportunity to dress up and score big in the candy department. For others, its the opportunity to go out and raise a little hell by partying until sunrise.
But unlike other candy consumption-oriented holidays or party-oriented holidays, Halloween combines the two with an environment of fear.
It is, perhaps, the only holiday where the participants are virtually required to approach a stranger's house for the purpose of seeking treats or fun. And that's where the fear starts, because what if that house belongs to that recent transplant from Transylvania
And once on the inside, they invite you to "make yourself comfortable and have a seat". You were already a little uncomfortable, but now, your spook-o-meter is about to spike because of their taste in furniture, because, well, the chair to which you've been directed to sit looks something like the following examples.
If a chair is seemingly formed by the impact of a human body having been dropped or thrown from a great height, how comfortable would you be sitting in it? Ezra Tazari's "Free Fall" chair forces you to confront that prospect.
Better yet, how will would you be to sit in Thomas Feichtner's M3 chair? Here's the concept:
Liberated from the demands normally made on a mass-produced item, this design experiments with functionality, structural engineering and material. Both its back and its armrests are mere tangents of the construction, the functions of which are only discovered via actual use. With a seating surface floating within the construction and legs extending far to the sides, the M3 is most assuredly not a chair that saves space—it is much rather one which creates a space [of exactly one cubic meter; hence the name of the piece]
Yes, being asked to sit in a Thomas Feichtner M3 chair is the same as being asked to fit yourself inside a box. Scared yet?
What's more inviting than being asked to sit in a chair that's also a storage unit for closet hanger? Which we note says a lot about what the chair's owner thinks about their guest's seating requirements. We suppose that being asked to hang around in a closet might be, but for those fearless souls seeking a new sitting experience, the Coat Check chair might fit the bill.
What if your host is really a cyborg from the future who has been sent back in time to terminate
What if the chair in which you've been asked to sit resembles a creature more than a chair - making it more of a furniture organism, if you will? Eyal Hirsh's "Pet Stool" adds a plush appendage to the more traditional three-legged stool....
Say, did you ever wonder what happened to your old bike? The one that disappeared from your yard one day when you were a kid? Bruno Urh's "Chair for Janez Suhadolc" re-configures it for stationary seating purposes, but still keeps your old bike's "chafing" seat at the center of the sitting experience.
And speaking of bike seats:
Jeremy Petrus collaborated with Italian bike saddle manufacturer Selle Royal to create the "Mishmash" chair presented above.
Hey, remember that chair made from coat hangers? We bet you'd really rather sit on that one than this concept, envisioned by Italian design firm Stylemylife, which takes the same concept down a different path:
Let's call that one a throne of bones. And don't you just love the decor! You'll be very comfortable chatting with your neighbor there....
Meanwhile, you might quite literally be sucked into a separate dimension if you dare sit in Artem Zigert's "Mechanical Perspective" chair:
Finally, via Barry Ritholtz, a ginormous infographic that describes how sitting is killing you!
Maybe you should think twice before taking that offered seat....
Update 19 February 2013: The original source for the infographic above is Medical Billing and Coding, who entered it into the public domain along with the exact code we've incorporated in this post back on 9 May 2011 - our apologies for missing this citation in our original post!
Why Chairs and Halloween?
What can we say? We have some odd holiday traditions here at Political Calculations. For us, nothing says Halloween or a trip to the corporate suites of Goldman Sachs quite like a super scary chair!