Where did these chairs come from?

 Taking this chair class raises all sorts of thoughts. At a glance many of the Windsor chairs made today look like a classic 18th-century Windsor chair. Baluster turnings, bent arms and backs. White pine sculpted seats, H-stretchers, finished with paint. Easy enough to think these modern chairs are the same as the old ones. The makers I know best are Pete Galbert, Curtis Buchanan & Elia’s Bizzari - I met George Sawyer for the first time last year… 

Perfect bending ash

A similar notion applies to Jennie Alexander’s ladderback chair - it looks like the Appalachian chairs Andy Glenn just wrote about. But Alexander's chair isn’t “just like” those chairs - JA pushed and pushed the idea of the chair, the technology of the joint and the streamlined thin-ness of the parts. Andy touched on this in his book, talking about how all the other chairmakers used heavier parts than JA. Their thinking is that heavier is stronger, but that's not necessarily the case. But it’s harder to sell the JA chair to the public - it looks too fragile. Once you know about how the JA chair is made, it’s clearly not fragile, but to an ordinary customer it sure looks that way.