The distinguished architect and writer Witold Rybczynski talks about the history of the chair from the folding stools of pharaonic Egypt to the ubiquitous stackable monobloc chairs of today. The history of the chair is a social as well as a technological history—of different ways of sitting, of changing manners and attitudes, and of varying tastes.

There will be a book signing following the lecture featuring Rybczynski’s new book Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2016).