Every few years a designer finds another way to give a chair the semblance of a human body, and the very lexicon of chair design suggests why designers should.
Chairs are the solid shadows of humanity and indeed of all animal life.
It is not just that they have legs. They have feet, or at least claws. At the Brooklyn Museum's recent Converging Cultures exhibit I saw a massive Peruvian eighteenth-century ecclesiastical armchair with spooky toe joints. And the jargon of furniture continues the metaphor. Chairs have knuckles.