These chairs are not for sitting — or at least, not only for that. Occupying the charged terrain between design and art, the works gathered here treat the chair as sculptural proposition, each one a meditation on form, function, and the distance between the two.

Spanning modern and contemporary makers from Ron Arad and Donald Judd to Mary Heilmann, Isamu Noguchi, and Richard Tuttle, the volume is generous in layout and genuinely surprising in range — photographic essays by Nicolas Polli and Jean Vincent Simonet bring each piece into full relief, while texts trace the friction between art and design and explore the collection's significance to its assembler, Thierry Barbier-Mueller. A book that rewards slow looking and gives the imagination room to roam.