DESIGN ANTHOLOGY/ MUSEUMS’ SERIES
Steven Holl Architects, A2 Chair, pictured at the Steven Myron Holl Architectural Archive, Rhinebeck, New York, 2025. Image credit: © Susan Wides
Steven Holl originally designed the A2 Chair in 2014 for guest seating at outdoor performances and events at the ‘T’ Space Gallery in Rhinebeck, New York. Today, more than sixty A2 chairs are in use across the Steven Myron Holl Architectural Archive and Archive Gallery in Rhinebeck, with select pieces also found at the Ex of IN House and the architect’s own residence.
Constructed of bent steel rod and solid mahogany, the chair’s proportions were traced from Holl’s own seated form. Its most distinctive and provocative feature is the inward-curving backrest—a surprising gesture that enhances both support and ergonomic embrace. This exploration of curvature for back support began with Holl’s Lumbar Chair for the Loisium Hotel in Austria (2005). Yet no other chair design in furniture history exhibits such a distinctive convex cylindrical segment with a flat exterior face.
The backrest’s convexity breaks the linearity of the frame, introducing a moment of spatial compression and release—a tactile gesture of almost a point support for the body while visually balancing the chair’s open geometry.
The name A2 derives from Holl’s earlier A Chair, designed in the 1980s—his first venture into furniture design. With a distinct triangulation, this time not as a tripod but as a triangulated top bar, the chair can be easily lifted and stacked. A later variation, produced in bent aluminum with a silver-gray finish, proved lighter but less stable.
Fabricator Javier Gomez developed a precise method for shaping the chair: the mahogany seat and back were inserted around the bent steel frame and fastened before the final bending, as the wooden components could not be installed once the frame had set its form.
The A2 Chair is a cylindrical concave segment whose curvature mediates between rigid linear structure and ergonomic embrace—both functional and expressive, and characteristic of Holl’s idea of “body-scaled architecture.”
Dimitra Tsachrelia Holl is an architect and Principal at Steven Holl Architects (Cultural and Residential Projects). Holl also serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.