Chair-Spotting: David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp

Do chairs make the man?

“Wow. Modern.” Hana’s exclamation is an understatement: Asterios Polyp’s apartment is a veritable trove of iconic Modernist design. Or, looking at his décor in another light, Modernist clichés. Can you identify them all?

Asterios Polyp is David Mazzucchelli’s first solo graphic novel; he is known for work such as Batman: Year One and the acclaimed adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass. A professor recommended Asterios Polyp to me; in turn, I recommend it to you! The story, the art, the page layout are all exquisitely designed, befitting a work about a professor of architecture.

Polyp is the proud owner of the Eames Plywood Lounge Chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair, Marcel Breuer’s Wassily or B3 Chair, not to mention a sofa by Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray’s E1027 side table, George Nelson’s Slat or Platform Bench, Isamu Noguchi's Prismatic Table, and what I think looks like Jean Prové’s Em Table beside the Eames. (If anyone can identify the central coffee table or anything else I may have missed, let me know!) And, when Hana brings in her reproduction Noguchi table, we learn that Asterios Polyp only owns genuine pieces.

The chairs were all created by furniture designers who were also architects: good design is organically integrated into all aspects of life, great and small. (Although “organic” is a funny word to use given the general perception of modernist design being rendered in glass, concrete and metal.) Polyp’s furniture choices display not only his commitment to design, but also his rigid arrogance. Yet, significantly, Mazzucchelli opens Asterios Polyp by giving us our first glimpse of Polyp’s apartment when it is in utter disarray and Polyp is in the nadir of his life: divorced, in debt, filthy and watching filth.

A chance lightning strike drives him out of his apartment, and his prized collection of furniture goes up in flames.

It is tempting to read this incident as a straightforward destruction of Polyp’s old life and the ideals symbolized by the chairs; however, I think the details resist such an interpretation. Hana’s tansu and Noguchi table also burn. Also, while Polyp is a professor of architecture and has won awards for his design, he is a “paper architect” – none of his designs have ever been built, unlike the icons of Modernist architecture whose furniture peoples his apartment.

But enough of my preliminary thoughts. I encourage you to go forth and read, or better, buy and read, Asterios Polyp and decide for yourself how the furniture builds meaning in the graphic novel!