Arminta Wallace meets designer Gearóid Ó Conchubhair whose orchestral chair, designed for musicians, makes its debut tonight
You've heard the expression "up and down like a fiddler's elbow". Well, it didn't come out of nowhere. Watch a symphony orchestra at work and you'll notice some startling postural goings-on - as Gearóid Ó Conchubhair discovered when he set out to research and design the ultimate chair for musicians. "Violinists," he says, "always tend to put their right leg out. That's a thing everybody in the musical world knows about, but nobody ever builds it into design calculations. In fact, it acts as a kind of cantilever to the way the violin is held, and helps facilitate the bowing action."
Cellists, meanwhile, have to sit with their legs wide apart - and sometimes get bruises from the hard edges of chair legs in the process. "And then," adds Ó Conchubhair, "a lot of musicians also sit on the edge of their chairs." Why? "Well, when they were studying they were probably told to sit forward and sit up straight. But ergonomic research over the past 20 years shows that the best way to sit up straight is to roll your pelvis forward and drop your knees. Musicians intuitively sit forward so as to do this - and you'll often see them wrap their legs around their chair legs to stop themselves from slipping forwards. Many orchestral musicians are at work for up to eight hours a day - so chairs are something they're very interested in."
Chairs are also something of a passion for Ó Conchubhair, a lecturer in industrial design at the National College of Art and Design, who won an EBS Craft Award in 1993 for his Anú chair, a featherlight sculptural creation in stretched wood and steel. The orchestral chair, designed as part of his PhD thesis, is a much more robust affair. Since musicians are constantly on the move, it was required not only to be portable but also stackable - and durable. But it is, he insists, more than just a mechanical solution to a set of design problems. It has a distinctive aesthetic appeal of its own. Made - as are many musical instruments - from cherry wood, its adjustable seat contains two kinds of foam, including "slow recovery foam" which moulds itself to the body with uncanny firmness; the sleek, slim back panel gives both lumbar and thorassic support without being unduly restrictive.
All of which translates into a sitting experience which can only be described - in technical terms - as "springissimo". "I'm not quite sure where art meets design, but there is an area in between the two where furniture design seems to fit," says the Offaly-born designer, whose father was a wheelwright turned cabinet-maker. Once it has been patented Ó Conchubhair hopes the chair will go into production and, eventually, make its way into orchestra pits worldwide. Meanwhile it will make its Irish "debut" tonight when cellist Gerry Kelly plonks himself on it to perform with the Dublin Baroque Players in Cork. The concert will be repeated at Kings' Inns, Dublin next Saturday.