The Latin American Chair

Abstract

This study analyzes the evolution of chair design in the Argentine Republic as a sequence of paradigmatic transformations analogous to those described by Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Through a qualitative hermeneutic approach, it examines three emblematic cases - the matera chair, the B.K.F. chair, and the Aro chair - all situated within the American Liberal Social Order, but corresponding to three successive aesthetics: non-modern (proto-rationalist), modern (neo-rationalist), and postmodern (eclecticist).

The analysis draws on the categories proposed by Jordi Llovet, who critically adapted Jean Baudrillard’s semiological concepts to the field of industrial design. Llovet’s four constitutive values of the designed object - functional, aesthetic, symbolic, and economic - are expanded here with a fifth, emergent value: socio-environmental use-value, integrating ecological sustainability, social justice, and the revaluation of local knowledge.

The findings show that the matera chair exemplifies a phase of Kuhnian normal science (artisanal), in which the functional, aesthetic, and symbolic values appear unified. The B.K.F. chair, by contrast, embodies a Kuhnian paradigmatic revolution (industrial), characterized by the fragmentation of these values and the hegemony of exchange-value. Finally, the Aro chair illustrates a new crisis of the Kuhnian paradigm (industrial) and the gestation of a hybrid-sustainable paradigm (semi-industrial, semi-artisanal), in which the values are critically and ethically reintegrated.

The study confirms that the everyday object — in this case, the chair — functions as a material document of historical revolutions, in which worldviews, modes of production, and social relations are contested.