This type of easy chair with a reclining back has been produced since the seventeenth century. After 1860 the company owned by Englishman William Morris, founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, manufactured and marketed this chair. With its stringent, no-frills design focusing only on elementary parts, it probably served as a model for the later designs of Josef Hoffmann. The Arts and Crafts movement, which greatly influenced Hoffmann and his colleagues Gustav Siegel and Koloman Moser in Austria, was opposed to mechanized mass production and what they regarded as inhuman products. The movement advocated an ethic and aesthetic motivated by social concerns, with form, function, material, and production understood as a unity. Around the turn of the century the Jacob & Josef Kohn company, which produced bentwood furniture to an industrial standard, hired the avant-garde Viennese architects Hoffmann, Siegel and Moser to make their line more appealing to higher-end clients by means of fashionable designs. Hoffmann’s model No. 670 was presented as part of one of his most important projects, a furnished model country home for the Vienna Art Show in 1908. The chair was distributed by Jacob & Josef Kohn until 1916. Here, the admittedly pedestrian form of the reclining easy chair is given a striking mechanical look. The frame construction made of bent squared timber with a frame filled with geometrically arranged pieces of plywood and the semicircular curves of the rear section emphasize the constructive aspect of the object. The balls which are as functional as they are decorative – a typical detail of Hoffmann’s – balance the curved and rectangular elements. At the same time as they stabilize the chair in the corners of the structure and under the runners, they support a shiftable crossbar on the rear arches which locks the back section at different reclining angles. Additionally, they create a visual balance to the square holes in the side and back sections. Presumably Jacob & Josef Kohn offered the “Sitzmaschine,” as the model No. 670 was later called, with loose cushions. The example shown here with a pull-out footrest was a special order or produced only in a small series. MSC