A design book in one chair · prototype edition
The Hundred-Year Chair
Designing atoms in the age of bits.
In 1934 Gerrit Rietveld priced a chair to the guilder: the wood, the labor of assembly, the paint, listed separately so a buyer of modest means could decide which work to purchase and which to contribute. Ninety-two years later we rebuilt his chair from salvage for ten dollars, found a bug in his drawing that only building could find, and then designed a chair of our own the way he would have with today’s tools: four rectangles of plywood, two brackets that carry all the geometry, eight bolts, one third of a standard sheet, nothing left over but sawdust and a theorem.
This site is the book, and the book is the workshop: the essays, the evidence, the free-body diagrams, the failed revisions, and the interactive instruments we used to design it. The design is open. The chair is real. You can build one.
The Block Rose: 25 chairs, 7 sheets, 21 strips, every dimension true. The empty tails are the waste.
The Chair That Ships Flat
The whole adventure in one essay: Rietveld’s cost list, the bug in the 1934 drawing, a chair reverse-engineered from a photograph, and why the durable thing was never the chair.
Play · instrument no. 1The Fan
A century of seat-and-back geometry in one frame. Famous chairs pre-loaded; add your own chair, or a hypothetical one, and see where it lands.
Read · living notesEighteen chapters
Ten thousand years of sitting, the economics of 1934 and 2034, the bracket as bone, the parity theorem, affordances, and what happens when labor is free. Updated from the workshop as the work happens.
The atoms
The bits on this site are free. The atoms will be for sale: a bracket kit that ships in a padded envelope (two brackets, eight bolts, eight steel inserts, and a print of the Block Rose for the cubby), plus a cut map tuned to your local sheet standard. You supply a third of a sheet of plywood and an afternoon. Not yet available; the prototype chairs are still being sat on, leaned back in, and deliberately abused.
The Hundred-Year Chair · Model K · hundredyearchair.com · prototype, August 2026. Every figure on this site is generated from the same scripts that cut the chair; where a value is estimated rather than measured, it says so. Archival material: Centraal Museum Utrecht, Rietveld Schröder Archive.