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Watch The Throne
Author’s Note: This essay contains spoilers for Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, both the books and the TV adaptation.
Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe once remarked that “a chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier.” It’s a surprising, provocative consideration: that chairs, for all of their small-scale simplicity, still find ways to challenge us through their demands as both a decorative and functional object, embodying ideas and perspectives within the material manifestation of their fabricated forms.
Chairs are almost always an accessory, parts of an ensemble of furnishings. They’re hardly ever the center of attention in interior decor, unless it’s for a coffee table book that features hundreds of them or for an exhibition of design history like The Schaudepot at the Vitra Design Museum. Designers rarely (if ever) create only chairs, incorporating this kind of object into a whole portfolio of furniture that embodies their aesthetic values and craftsmanship. As Jesús Llinares of Andreu World points out, “Often we do not notice chairs, [but] they are nevertheless a real luxury, and a tremendously valuable object not for their price or exclusivity, but for being part of our life more than we are able to see.”
The subject of chairs — and what they represent socially, culturally, and politically — has been on my mind since I started watching HBO’s House of the Dragon. Like the rest of the Game of Thrones series, the main conflict of the show boils down to who has rightful claim over the Iron Throne and who does not. As questions of inheritance and legitimacy arise, this power struggle explodes into a brutal civil war that ultimately leaves Westeros’s ruling family, the Targaryens, irreversibly scarred.
Unlike the original show where the Iron Throne becomes largely symbolic and most of the story unfolds across Westeros’s seven kingdoms and beyond, almost all of the important political events in House of the Dragon happen within the Red Keep’s throne room. It’s the place where the results of King Jaehaerys’s Great Council would place Viserys in the line of succession over Rhaenys Targaryen, the Queen Who Never Was. It’s…
