And that diversity was the goal of Van Severen, who died of cancer at the too-young age of 48.
"Maarten didn't want the chair as a piece of art; he wanted it to be in the world," says Kris Lenaerts of the Maarten Van Severen Foundation, as we walk around a new exhibition dedicated to the late Flemish designer's famous chair. "He wanted his chair all over the place," he continues. "You can put it where you want. It adapts very easily. It keeps its personality."
It isn't the only time that Lenaerts, who long ago became friends with Van Severen, refers to the chair as if it were a human being.
Still, an exhibition devoted to one single chair? But Lenaerts holds firm. "A chair like this, it doesn't fall from heaven."
03 Maarten Van Severen at the Design Museum in Ghent takes visitors through the stages of the chair's life, from the designer's original attempts to create "his chair, the chair" in his own workshop through to collaborations with design and manufacturing companies Top-Mouton (now Aiki) and Vitra.
Part of an archiving project being undertaken by the Maarten Van Severen Foundation, the exhibition includes photographs, filmed interviews, design sketches and letters, as well as many models of the chair itself.
Keeping Van Severen's workshop and materials together was an idea the designer himself had talked about to family and friends, including Lenaerts, before his death in 2005. Van Severen, who also worked on projects together with with famous Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, wanted researchers and new designers to be able to consult his archive and for the objects to act as a source of inspiration for future generations. For Lenaerts, this shows that Van Severen was aware he had achieved "something quite important" in the design world.
Building the .03
A key feature of the .03 chair is the way in which the back, seat and legs are one fluid line. Until 1999, when Vitra started producing the chair, mass-market chairs were essentially made up of three separate sections: a back, a seat and the legs. Now these components were all one movement, supported by two legs at the back, Lenaerts said. "This was something completely different on the mass market."
On entering the exhibition, held downstairs in an open, white space full of light, you are first confronted with two very similar looking chairs. On closer inspection, you perceive the differences: the angle of the back, the thickness of the legs. One is a chair produced by Van Severen in his workshop; the other is the Vitra version. Only by sitting on both do you become aware of the most striking contrast; the Vitra chair uses a foam material that actually adapts to your body.
The differences are subtle, but each took time to develop, demanding new techniques and approaches. Form, function and material all played a role in the design. "Maarten thought of all these aspects together because he considered a chair a complicated piece of furniture," Lenaerts explains. "He wanted it to be perfect."
The emergence of the .03 chair took more than a decade, from 1986, when Van Severen designed his first chair, through CN° II (or Chair Number 2) in 1992 to Vitra's mass-produced .03 chair in 1999.
A key stage of its development was when Van Severen met Nick Top of Top-Mouton in the mid-1990s, and they agreed to work together to solve the designer's production difficulties. "It was a relief for Maarten," Lenaerts says, explaining how it meant that Van Severen no longer had to deal with practical problems such as late deliveries or product faults.
Not that perfection was allowed to be compromised. One of the exhibits is a chair with the word "model" scrawled on the back: this was the chair kept in the Top-Mouton/Aiki workshop so that if the workers had any doubts about a feature, they could go and check the model.
The exhibition uses Van Severen's own tables to display his sketches and letters, while the chairs themselves are perched on simple, white shelving units. It all aims to show the importance of archive material. "We want to prove that archives can be very exciting," Lenaerts says. "Just because it's an archive doesn't mean that it's dead material."
To underline this point, the exhibition includes a film of recent interviews with, among others, Van Severen's wife, Nick Top and Vitra's Rolf Fehlbaum. And a wall of one room is filled with large colour photographs showing locations where the chair is used today, including the Seattle public library and Filigranes bookshop in Brussels.
The deceptively simple .03 chair is very much alive.
Archiving the design work of Maarten Van Severen (1956-2005) is not a straightforward task. At the most basic level, how do you archive a chair? The City Archive of Ghent, where the objects are stored and inventoried, is more used to dealing with paperwork than 3D objects. But even the paperwork can be baffling, since Van Severen rarely dated anything.
These are just some of the difficulties that the Maarten Van Severen foundation, set up by his family and friends in 2008, is dealing with as it seeks to keep the designer's artistic legacy alive.
In some respects, it is a race against time. Take, for example, the reams and reams of faxes where the words are literally disappearing from the old thermal paper and so need to be transferred to a more durable medium before they are lost forever. Van Severen was a great fan of the fax, hating typewriters and, later, computers. His aversion to the internet meant that he had his secretary write any emails that needed sending.
The foundation aims to complete the inventory and make it available online by 2015. Whether that goal is achieved depends on several factors, not least securing further funding. Kris Lenaerts of the foundation remains optimistic and is already planning to take the Ghent exhibition on a world tour. He feels it is his and the foundation's duty to allow as many people as possible to discover Maarten Van Severen, described by exhibition organisers as "undoubtedly the most important Belgian designer of the previous two decades".
Your opinion matters!
Did you already fill out our satisfaction survey?
Flanders Today is a 
0°C / 6°C
