Souped-up seating in San Francisco - Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California

Sunset, Jan, 1994 by Daniel Gregory

MODERN ARCHITECTS from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry have found furniture design to be an irresistible extension of the building art. In the West and along the Pacific Rim, architectural chair design has been particularly creative, as a fascinating exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art demonstrates.

The show, on display through February 6, offers a first look at the collection of contemporary furniture that the museum (on Van Ness Avenue at McAllister Street; 415/863-8800) has amassed over the last five years.

Paolo Polledri, the museum's architecture and design curator, says that the 50 or so works on display demonstrate a distinctive "hot-rod" approach to design: "A hot-rod car consists of a modified chassis energized by a souped-up power plant. Designers of this kind of car employ the most efficient and economical means to boost the performance of their vehicle. This is essentially what the most innovative architects and designers around the Pacific Rim are doing when they approach the design of a chair."

The 1950 rocker by Charles and Ray Eames, who also designed the famous Eames lounge chair, is a good example of the kind of experimentation with forms and materials that Polledri sees as characteristic of West Coast design. The designers dissected and analyzed the functions of a chair and then "rebuilt" it in a new and vivid way, accentuating the distinctive functions of each major element by shaping them out of different materials. The seat, which combines seamlessly with the arms and back into a fluid unit, is molded fiberglass; the legs are steel struts; and the runners are birch. Polledri calls the rocker a "machine for sitting," recalling the technologically oriented approach that Alvar Aalto took in the design of his bentwood chairs from the 1930s.

If the exhibition whets your appetite to test-drive an architect-designed chair or two, pay a visit to one of the following showrooms in the city's Jackson Square area, all open weekdays only. (As you would expect with the Porsches of the furniture world, prices are premium only.) The ICF showroom, at 550 Pacific Avenue, carries work by Alvar Aalto, Marcel Breuer, and Eliel Saarinen, among others. The Herman Miller Showroom, at 1700 Montgomery Street, carries Eames furniture. Designs by Frank Gehry, Mies van der Rohe, and others are manufactured by The Knoll Group, whose new retail showroom is at 315 Montgomery.