Max Bill defended his designs for tables and chairs with just three legs on the purely materialistic grounds that ‘three-legged furniture is cheaper than four-legged’. The legs of the Tripod Chair shown here are connected by a triangular seat frame directly underneath the seat; the bent rear leg ends in the paddle-like backrest. Bill created both the more expansive version with conical legs shown here and a variant with cup-shaped feet, which never went into production. The seat and backrest of the Tripod Chair are made of slightly bent plywood. That two boards of the seat frame met the rear leg – and with it the main load-bearing part of the chair – at an angle of 60 degrees turned out to be a structural weakness. The problem was solved by adding a T-shaped support to the frame, which made for a sturdier chair, even though Bill himself preferred the triangular configuration. Not until 1951 did he succeed in developing a brilliant new solution for a four-legged chair: the Cross Frame Chair requiring only one board per leg.
Text: Claude Lichtenstein
