They have knees. They have elbows. Chairs have seats and backs, often reverse contours of our own. They have arms, often the size of ours. The protruding corners of Chippendale chairs are called ears.
Chairs even have a social life.
Many seem to travel in herds, like the curious little gilt ones that are toted from one society event to another, or they exist in stacks, like communally nesting swallows or purple martins. In the Fogg Museum exhibit for the Day Without Art, commemorating AIDS victims, chairs represent solidarity and individuality, and promise continuity. The exhibit was the idea of staff member Danielle Hanrahan. The scattered folding chairs in a Paris park, the firmly bolted oak seats of the jury box in what we Americans appropriately call a county seat, the empty rows of writing chairs in an American classroom, are stage sets for a social order. Debates over the position of pupils' seating fill the educational journals, and even psychoanalysts discourse at length about the differences of interaction using couches and chairs.