Star Trek: The Next Generation is 34 years old this year. It debuted three years after the Apple Macintosh, long before we had smartphones or tablets. And yet, if you watch an episode today, the USS Enterprise looks as futuristic as ever. That’s thanks largely to the set design, full of rounded rooms that flow seamlessly into the strange and soft furnishings. It’s as if society is so advanced, the technology recedes completely to comfort.
But in fact, these furnishings—the chairs in particular—were off-the-shelf designs. Sometimes they were painted, or modified to look future-y with buttons and lights. But more often than not, they were pulled from a designer storeroom and placed straight into the 23rd century.
The hunt begins
Many of the efforts are led by Tadeo D’Oria, a 3D artist in Buenos Aires. A Star Trek fan all his life, he taught himself 3D modeling software at the age of 14 in order to design his own ships, and he began posting his work on sci-fi forums. By the time he was 23, in 2016, D’Oria found himself trapped in a dead-end job and decided to pursue his passion.
“One thing led to another and, thanks to the small popularity I gained in those online forums, I was able to make a living as a freelance 3D artist,” he writes over email, “specializing in doing digital Star Trek interiors for clients who had their own fan ships and stories.”
To create authentic-looking Star Trek spaces, D’Oria began building a database of the props and sets across Star Trek movies and shows. That included tracking down a lot of chairs, figuring out the make and model, and then attempting to find PDFs with brochures that would include full sizing schematics so he could recreate them.
“I certainly wasn’t alone nor the first one interested in this sort of thing. Other fans had already identified several of the chairs used through the series (mostly the original ’60s show) and even created replicas,” writes D’Oria. “However because of my job doing essentially 3D reproductions of these chairs, having information about them was invaluable to me in order to work faster.”
In 2017, D’Oria even joined a team of fan volunteers to launch Stage 9, a video game that allowed you to explore the fully recreated USS Enterprise interior from The Next Generation. That work only pushed D’Oria’s obsession with Star Trek furniture further.
While CBS shut the game down, he had this rich collection of research that he didn’t want to see go to waste; he wanted to share it with others in the Star Trek modeling community. So he worked with Bernd Schneider, who runs the popular Star Trek site Ex Astris Scientia (the Starfleet Academy motto, which translates as “From the stars, knowledge”), to host the database and assist with research.
Unpacking our obsession with Saarinen
D’Oria now has the distinction of being, perhaps, the world’s leading expert on Star Trek chairs. While he doesn’t collect the chairs himself, he’s given a lot of thought to what chairs bring to sci-fi.
Truthfully, that space-age feel of Saarinen’s work never really went away. The world is still obsessed with Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center at JFK airport, which reopened as a hotel in 2019 following a $265 million renovation.
D’Oria has another theory as to why Saarinen’s work fits a utopian future so perfectly. He traces the design sensibility of Star Trek back to Matt Jeffries, who designed the original Enterprise ship for Star Trek.
“[Jeffries] gave it a clear, flat outer hull because he envisioned the craft as so utterly advanced that there was no need for exposed machinery. You were free to imagine all the wonders of technology running underneath that hull, yet they were so perfect and worked so well that nothing needed to be exposed or visible,” writes D’Oria. “The same kind of imaginative world-building is possible with the simple Saarinen chairs. Sure, they look less useful than even the cheapest of office chairs today, but place them in a sci-fi setting, and maybe under those clear panels there’s a computer that can make instant adjustments to the chair when someone sits to make it more comfortable to them in particular.”
Fast-forward 20 years into the future of television, or a century in the universe of Star Trek, and we end up at the USS Enterprise as we see it on Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG).
“For TNG, being the late ’80s and early ’90s, all that plastic got replaced with fabric, but the same mentality remained,” writes D’Oria. “You can’t see any mechanism in these chairs, thus you’re free to imagine they’re very advanced underneath all that.”
But some of the HÅG models used into the ’90s Star Trek began looking downright domestic. Normal. They were borderline the type of chair you might grab at an Office Depot.
“Logically, as the years rolled on and what was commercially available changed, the chairs we saw in Trek changed as well,” says D’Oria, “with desk office chairs becoming more and more prevalent as those designs flooded the market and became cheaper alongside household PCs.” In my opinion, these chairs don’t look entirely out of place, but they don’t do nearly as much work to set the scene of a future utopia as earlier choices.
Finding the favorite chair
Of all of D’Oria’s findings, he does have a favorite Star Trek chair. He believes it’s quite possibly the most used chair in Star Trek, having appeared in several movies and shows. And it’s a chair he only tracked down last year, with the help of a patient museum curator, with COVID-19 in full swing. (The saga, which you can read here, is truly incredible).
As for the chair itself, it is the Ergoform Workseat, which looks like if you took an ’80s desk chair, sliced it up, and glued the disembodied seat and backrest onto a single slab of metal.
Despite his accomplishment in tracking down the Workseat, D’Oria’s work in identifying the chairs of Star Trek continues. His list of the unidentified chairs across Star Trek may be longer than the identified ones! If you are interested in the project, and have an eye for furniture, his collaborators could use help.
“It was my idea to compile this list, but at this point, I think more than half the chairs on [the] list were identified by other people,” says D’Oria. “So if anything, this is a small testament to Star Trek’s core message, that if we work together, we can do far more than we can do on our own.”