The Big Chair

This guide to the Big Chair in Anacostia opens with Lynn Arnold, a 21-year-old who spent 42 days living in a glass box atop an oversized wooden dining chair outside a furniture showroom in 1960. It traces the chair back to furniture designer Leo Jiranek's problem: how to scale an ordinary Duncan Phyfe chair up to nineteen and a half feet without the legs buckling under their own weight. You'll hear how Curtis Brothers, the store that commissioned it in 1959, used Arnold's stunt to prove the design could bear real weight. Stand back from the sidewalk to take in its full height.