The chair has always been more than a utilitarian item in Mexican culture. The chair’s utility, its fundamental importance in everyday life, has made it a productive site for experimentation, producing some of the most iconic examples of Mexican design. In this volume, design curator Anna Elena Mallet explores the chair in Mexican cultural and design history. Organized chronologically as an illustrated timeline, Silla Mexicana presents a lively history of the chair from folk art to colonial-period manufacturing, culminating in the creations of contemporary architects and designers—the chair as a collectors’ item as well as a functional object.

Designers surveyed in this volume include Gaston Chaussat, William Spratling, Michael van Beuren, Eleuterio Cortés and Luis Barragán, Ezekiel Farca, Jorge Moreno, Bernardo Gómez-Pimienta, Anne Monique Renee Midy, Victor Klassen, Lucio Muniain and Carlos Mapelli, Alejandra and Cecelia Prieto, Louis Poiré and many more.

Foreword by: Jorge Rivas