When I began teaching writing to engineers at the University I was assigned a shared office in a back room off of the Mastery Room. This is where electrical engineering students go to sit in modernist aluminum chairs and take an arduous test on rows of computers in the windowless basement room of a dour, postwar building in a strikingly uncharismatic quadrant of campus. After semesters of eavesdropping, I still don’t know what the students are being tested on. Circuits or something—there seems to be no language involved, just numbers, runes, and geometrical line drawings. They look grimly anxious. They surrender their IDs to a proctor and are issued a calculator. I know some of these proctors, since they were students of mine. They sit at a station directly outside my door like bouncers. A few of them are actually affable guys, but when I see them there, I think of the Milgram Experiment.
The students are required to read a big intimidating poster titled MASTERY. I am incapable of looking at this poster without hearing, “Come crawling faster/ Obey your master!” from Metallica’s “Master of Puppets.” There are many rules and penalties. Nobody speaks. I’ve seen a few students cry in the hallway. The professor who presides over this room looks like Glenn Beck and dresses like Rick Santorum. Always a white shirt and a sweater vest. Sometimes a student flummoxed by the absence of other authority figures will knock on my door and ask me for instructions. I want to say run for your life, but instead tell them to sit quietly and wait for someone to come tell them what to do.
Much of one wall is covered with a bank of switches, gauges, and dials. A portrait of President Eisenhower would not look anachronistic next to it. One morning when I found the whole place empty, I flipped all the switches and cranked the rheostats up into the red zone—I am still waiting to feel the effect to this day. They look important and must do something. The building surely holds ancient or at least post-war mysteries. I’m still poking around for a walled-off doorway to a subbasement Civil Defense shelter.
This is the sort of room where institutional furniture is rendited before it gets disappeared. In other obscure basement rooms, one can easily find massive gray metal desks with their drawers gutted huddling with chairs whose casters have been ankled holding bulky CRT monitors in their once-upholstered laps. Strings of cabling tangle through the legs like neglected catheter tubes. Someday, they will be “recycled.” Until then, I presume they just hope to be ignored.
But here, in the Mastery Room, distinctive, stalwart aluminum chairs persist, thrive even. They perhaps don’t realize their peers are chic now. Some of their colleagues who were liberated or whose freedom had been purchased by the design-conscious elite are showcased in catalogues for sums that inspire the criminal in me. These chairs have been enislanded in this too-plain-to-even-be-frumpy room and are just too utile to be sent away with their no-longer-adjustable cousins. Their padding has long since powdered away, but many of them have been re-covered. Most of them feature a V of pockmarks on the seat, where the electrical engineers have spread their legs and jabbed the gray-brown vinyl seat cover with their mechanical pencils.
Recently one of my surprisingly erudite electrical engineering students described another campus in this region as the kind of place where one might get attacked by a gargoyle. That’s my kind of architecture. Where the white noise is from the wind keening around granite finials, not the droning hum and rattle of aluminum ductwork just above the drop ceiling. Yet I have a strange fondness for this drably durable chair.
Though my own taste runs toward the Woodland Gothic (if there is such a thing), I am often listening to Einsturzende Neubauten on my headphones as I grade papers in my office. I like the menacing and antic aesthetic of industrial music, and much of the equipment and furniture in the basement of this industrial building interests me, though not in the way that it is intended.
I knew these chairs at first sight. Originally, I thought I recognized them from my youth, when they were the progenitors of the disgusting, butt-sweat collecting plastic bucket seats that came to replace them. They represent the last era of metallic authoritarianism, when fixtures were still welded and not extruded. But I realized they held a contemporary place in my imagination, and it took me a while to discover why.
Finally, I realized these chairs are on TV every single day. I could flip through the channels right now and find one. Virtually every time someone gets their hands cuffed behind them and interrogated or tortured, they are in this very chair. It’s not even worth listing all the shows I’ve seen it in. If there is a detective, a two-way mirror, or a vacant warehouse, this chair is present. It’s like a bit part actor who has managed to be in every single hour-long drama ever filmed. Sitting in this chair will result in bag over your head, with a bare high-wattage lightbulb dangling over you, as you are knocked over, over and and over until you learn to obey your master.
I see it in NCIS Los Angeles, in their “boathouse,” where it is juxtaposed against buttery, sunlit coziness. It appears regularly in CSI—once the labwork is done and the detained suspects try to stick to their stories. It gets fetishized in Person of Interest with deep shadows and stark highlights. One of the most interesting places to spot this chair is in the office of ISIS, where the spy Sterling Archer nominally works in the animated show, Archer. This show has excellent set design and no sets, since it’s a cartoon. Most recently, I saw it in the movie Riddick, which is set in the distant future. There, on a mercenary’s spaceship, orbiting an unnamed post-apocalyptic planet, sits this chair.
This is the sort of furniture meant to instill anxiety. One waits in it, one works in it, one gets cuffed to it. This type of chair defers to the chieftain of its clan—the armed chair, the “daddy chair” of the home dining room set, the quasi-militarized “captain’s chair.” Users of the rank and file versions of these chairs were never advised to sit on a yoga ball. It’s from the era of ergonomics that had its legs in scientific management and not the blandishments that come with the ass-spread of contemporary drone work.
This sort of chair is self-sufficient, assured of its role. It persists and does not need to abide. It can’t be folded up and sidelined to make room for yoga mats. It is a permanent chair from when employment and social position were permanent. No child has ever sat in it. It enthuses fetishists. It doesn’t care about asses, but it holds them because that’s its job. The asses meant for this chair were meant to know their places in the world, and to accept harsh reminders of it. Which seems to sit well with the occupants of the Mastery Room.
