A few years later, when Otto Wagner, the dean of Austrian avant-garde architects, was building the Postsparkasse, the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank in Vienna, a seminal building of the Secession movement, he likewise furnished it with Gebrüder Thonet bentwood chairs of his own design. Wagner’s side chairs and armchairs had very simple geometrical shapes, and they were a radical departure from tradition: instead of a round dowel he specified a square cross-section, and he gave it an ebonized finish (previously bentwood chairs had been stained). One of Wagner’s most memorable designs was a stool for public use in the main banking hall: the black frame is a perfect cube made out of five identical pieces of bentwood supporting a veneer seat with a rectangular slot for lifting. Soon, chairs in the new “Postsparkassen style” appeared in the Thonet catalogue.
Wagner’s Post Office Savings Bank was a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art in which architecture, decor, and furnishings contributed to the aesthetic effect. This all-encompassing approach was the foundation of the Wiener Werkstätte, an artists’ and craftsmen’s cooperative that undertook architectural commissions and produced furniture, textiles, tableware, and jewelry and other luxury goods. In 1907, the Werkstätte established its own nightclub, the Cabaret Fledermaus, in the cellar of a Viennese apartment house. The architect Josef Hoffmann, co-founder of the Werkstätte, was not only responsible for the decor, he also designed the furniture, as well as the crockery, silverware, and serving dishes. The nightclub’s bentwood chairs had an upholstered seat and a curved unpadded back rail that became the arms. By all accounts the chairs were not particularly comfortable, but they were a radical departure from the bentwood chairs of the past, with runners instead of straight legs and stylish ornament in the form of billiard-ball-size spheres. Kohn supplied the chair in an ebonized finish with white balls, and vice versa. The ball motif also showed up in Hoffman’s Sitzmaschine, a lounge chair designed in 1905 for another Werkstätte project, the Purkersdorf Sanatorium outside Vienna. The frames that formed the arms, legs, and back of the chair were bent ash; the solid inserts with decorative cutouts were sycamore. The back was adjustable and a footrest pulled out from under the seat. The chair was provided with a fitted cushion, although with its flat back, square geometry, and hard surfaces it doesn’t look very inviting. According to the Museum of Modern Art, which has the Sitzmaschine in its collection: “This armchair, with its exposed structure, demonstrates a rational simplification of forms suited to machine production.” Actually, most of the little wooden balls appear highly irrational, the “simple” connections all rely on screws, and because there are so many different parts to assemble the claim that the form is suited to machine production is far-fetched. On the other hand, it definitely looks machinelike.
Postsparkasse stool (Otto Wagner)
By the early 1900s, in addition to traditional designs, which constituted the bulk of their production, Gebrüder Thonet and other bentwood manufacturers were offering “modern” chairs, many of which were designed by architects. The desire of avant-garde architects to furnish interiors with furniture of their own design was not uncommon at the time. M. H. Baillie Scott and C.F.A. Voysey in London, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret, in Glasgow, and the young Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago also designed special chairs. But these architect-designed chairs were custom-made in small quantities in local workshops and were not available to the public, whereas Wagner’s bank stool and Hoffmann’s Sitzmaschine could be purchased from the Thonet and Kohn showrooms.
Sitzmaschine (Josef Hoffmann)
The Viennese collaboration between architects and industry signals a historical shift. For centuries, the man who conceived the chair and the man who made it had been the same person. This started to change in the eighteenth century: Chippendale was assisted by journeymen joiners, but at least by training and experience he was familiar with the craft. A French master joiner had a similar intimate knowledge of chairmaking, even if the carving, gilding, and upholstery were done by others. By the time Michael Thonet’s factories were in full swing, he must be considered more an entrepreneur than a cabinetmaker, although the fabrication process was his own invention and the chairs were his design. By the early 1900s, the industrial process that Thonet invented made it possible to separate the design of a chair from its fabrication. The era of the independent chair designer, who was neither a cabinetmaker nor a manufacturer, had arrived.
EIGHT
By Design
The Wassily Chair is a modern classic. This version of a traditional club chair is made out of leather straps stretched inside a framework of shiny steel tubes. The Vitra Design Museum describes the chair as “the epitome of the spirit of Modernity” and “an aesthetic turning point in furniture production.” A Museum of Modern Art catalogue accompanying a recent exhibition on the Bauhaus didn’t mince words and simply called it “perfect.”
I came across the Wassily Chair as an architecture student. I knew it only from photographs—none of my friends owned one—so I never had a chance to sit in it, but I wanted one. I must have told my wife about my craving, for one year she presented me with the chair on my birthday. It was as handsome in real life as it had been in photographs. The leather seat, back, and arms seemed to be suspended in midair within a metal frame that had the appearance of an early flying machine. I looked forward to using it for reading, but I was disappointed when I sat in it. The extreme angle of the seat allowed only one sitting position, so I soon started to fidget—as much as this unyielding chair would allow. The hard edge of the leather cut into the underside of my thighs; the armrest, which resembled a barber’s strop, was unpleasant; getting up was difficult; and when I placed a book on the seat, it slid off. Eventually, the chair was relegated to our bedroom, where it functioned perfectly as a place to hang my trousers.
How is it possible for a chair with so many functional shortcomings to become a classic? The brief answer is that what makes Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair a classic has less to do with its performance than with its appearance. In other words, the criteria are chiefly aesthetic. “I think that comfort is a function of whether you think the chair is good-looking or not,” Philip Johnson once observed. “I have had Mies van der Rohe chairs now for twenty-five years in my home wherever I go. They are not very comfortable chairs, but, if people like the looks of them they say ‘Aren’t these beautiful chairs,’ which indeed they are. Then they’ll sit in them and say, ‘My, aren’t they comfortable.’” Johnson didn’t reveal what people said when they tried to get up out of Mies’s Barcelona Chairs, which are very low and lack arms. Probably “Oof!”
The idea that a chair can be appreciated primarily as an aesthetic object originated with the Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld. Although Rietveld was trained as a cabinetmaker by his joiner father, the iconic easy chair that he built in 1918, a year after opening his own furniture workshop in Amsterdam, owed little to the furniture maker’s craft. The chair was made out of pieces of standard lumber simply screwed together—no dovetails, no mortise-and-tenon joints. The seat and the back were flat wooden planks.
Wassily Chair (Marcel Breuer)
In some ways, Rietveld’s chair resembles my trusty Adirondack chair. The Adirondack chair, which was invented by Thomas Lee in 1903, likewise uses flat boards and uncomplicated joints. But the resemblance ends there. Lee’s aim was to make a simple outdoor chair for his summer house in Westport, New York; Rietveld’s aim was to make an artistic statement. The statement was about geometry and space. Each part of the chair—seat, back, legs, arms—was articulated and given equal visual importance. The wood was initially varnished, but in later versions Rietveld painted the back red, the seat blue, and the frame black and yellow, which made it look like a three-dimensional Mondrian painting (Rietveld and Mondrian both belonged to the De Stijl art group). The chair became known as the Red Blue Chair. The use of a title is revealing. Thonet simply assigned catalogue numbers or descriptive labels to his chairs, but Rietveld’s chair w
as a work of art, so it had to have a title.
The Red Blue Chair abounds with ergonomic challenges: the edges are sharp, the seat is hard and steeply angled, the armrests are flat pieces of wood. According to the architectural historian Peter Collins, Rietveld’s chair was “the first chair deliberately designed not for comfort, not for dignity, not for elegance, not for rational assembly according to commonly accepted principles of woodwork, but simply ‘designed.’” For the early-twentieth-century European avant-garde, “design” was a universal language, the visual equivalent of Esperanto. The architect Walter Gropius expressed a commonly held view when he proclaimed, “the process of designing a great building or a simple chair differs only in degree, not in principle.” According to Collins, not only did modern chairs resemble architectural structures, modern buildings came to resemble furniture, inasmuch as they were designed “to look good from the air: i.e., from the point of view which one normally sees furniture when entering a room.”
Gropius founded the Bauhaus arts and crafts school to teach his universalist proposition. One of his first students was a young Hungarian, Marcel Breuer, who had been an art student in Vienna, but dissatisfied with what he considered an overly theoretical education had enrolled in the Bauhaus woodworking program. A precocious talent, Breuer became Gropius’s protégé, and after he graduated he was invited back to teach furniture design. That was 1925, and that same year, working in his spare time, Breuer built the Wassily Chair.1 He was only twenty-three, and although he had built wooden chairs as a student, this was his first project in tubular steel. The overall form of the chair was influenced by Rietveld’s Red Blue Chair, which had been exhibited at the Bauhaus. Like the Red Blue Chair, the Wassily Chair was a constructivist design statement, although it was slightly more inviting because the stretched fabric of the original was more accommodating than flat wood.
Breuer ordered the nickel-plated tubular steel pieces from the Mannessmann Steel Works, which, in the 1890s, had invented a process of manufacturing seamless tubes that, unlike the seamed variety, could be bent. Breuer said that his interest in tubular steel was sparked by the handlebars of his first bicycle. He recalled that a friend told him: “Did you ever see how they make those parts? How they bend those handlebars? You would be interested because they bend those steel tubes like macaroni.” Although German hospitals used furniture made out of steel, which was more hygienic than wood, no one had previously used tubular steel for a domestic chair.
It is impossible to overstate the impact of Breuer’s chair on the architectural avant-garde. The design ethos of the time was “starting over,” that is, doing away with traditional forms and traditional ornament. In buildings this meant flat-roofed, undecorated white boxes, but how to start over in furniture? The Red Blue Chair was more like a manifesto than an actual piece of furniture, nor was it really suited to industrial production, despite its maker’s claim. Tubular steel, on the other hand, was an industrial product—and looked it. This was the first technical innovation in furniture-making since Michael Thonet developed bentwood sixty-five years earlier.
Breuer was uniquely qualified to lead the way. He had experience, having built furniture for several of Gropius’s projects and for Bauhaus exhibitions. He had sufficient expertise in carpentry to pass a journeyman’s exam after graduation, but his imagination was not constrained by traditional furniture-making techniques. He belonged to the first generation that was trained in modernist design principles—when Breuer had been a Bauhaus student, the master of the carpentry shop and his teacher was Johannes Itten, the Swiss expressionist painter and radical design theorist.
For Breuer, the five years following the introduction of the Wassily Chair were intensely productive. He designed a variety of furniture for the new Bauhaus buildings: side chairs and sofa beds for the faculty housing, tilt-up theater seats for the auditorium, and tables and stools for the cafeteria—all in tubular steel. The furniture was handmade in the school workshop but Breuer had industrial production in mind; like Thonet, he used standardized parts and designed the chairs to be knocked down for shipping. In 1927, together with Kalman Lengyel, a fellow Hungarian, Breuer founded Standard-Möbel specifically to manufacture and market his own furniture.
Thanks to Lengyel’s mismanagement the company foundered, and it was soon acquired by Gebrüder Thonet, which, starting in 1928, took over the manufacture of Breuer’s designs. Although tubular steel chairs are often described as lightweight and inexpensive, compared with bentwood they were neither. Steel is heavier than wood (the Wassily Chair weighs thirty pounds, almost twice as much as a typical bentwood lounge chair), and precision tubular steel was expensive: a Breuer side chair cost about three times as much as a typical café chair. Nevertheless, Thonet wanted to diversify, and tubular steel furniture was the perfect opportunity to be in the forefront of the industry once again.
Breuer had noticed that if the Bauhaus cafeteria stool was turned on its side it became, in effect, a seat supported on two legs—a cantilever chair. There had been several earlier attempts to build cantilever chairs. The most serious effort was made by Mart Stam, a Dutch architect living in Berlin, who in 1926 began experimenting with tubular furniture. Stam built a crude cantilever chair out of threaded steel pipes connected by plumbing elbows; the first prototype collapsed when he sat on it, but he persevered. Whether he got the idea after talking to Breuer and seeing his tubular experiments, as Breuer later claimed, or whether he developed the concept independently remains unclear, but there is no doubt that the tubular steel and canvas chair that Stam displayed at the 1927 Weissenhoff Exhibition in Stuttgart is the first successful example of a cantilever chair.
The Weissenhoff housing exhibition, which featured buildings designed by leading avant-garde architects such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Josef Frank, and Mart Stam, was coordinated by Mies van der Rohe. At an organizational meeting, Stam showed Mies a sketch of his idea for a cantilever chair. Mies recognized the breakthrough that the chair represented and immediately set about designing his own version, which was also displayed at the Stuttgart exhibition. Mies’s design is much more elegant than Stam’s—the front legs curve into the seat in a sweeping arc—and it also includes a small but crucial difference. Stam used cast tubing and reinforced the bends by inserting pieces of solid steel rod, which created a strong but perfectly rigid frame. Like Breuer, Mies used Mannessmann tubing, which allowed the chair to flex. Such springiness, analogous to the movement of a rocking chair, was something entirely new in sitting furniture.
Although Mies had previously designed wood furniture, the MR10 was his first chair in tubular steel, and it is a reflection of his talent that he was able to produce this beautiful chair in only six months. But he was not experienced in designing for industry. While the MR10 looked extremely simple, it was not easy to fabricate and turned out to be the most expensive tubular chair in Thonet’s line. The design had another drawback: like all cantilever chairs, it tended to tip forward if you sat on the edge. Thonet modified the design to lessen the tippiness, but it could not be removed altogether. It’s always risky to sit on the edge of a cantilever chair.
A year after Mies produced the MR10, Breuer unveiled his own version of a cantilever side chair. The Wassily Chair had been a youthful effort that privileged aesthetics over practicality. Now, although still only twenty-six, Breuer was an experienced designer and he brought the two into balance with his Cesca Chair, manufactured by Thonet as B32.2 The seat and back are beechwood frames with woven cane inserts; because the frames are shaped and curved they are more comfortable than stretched fabric or leather. In addition, the frames act as bracing, reducing the amount of tubing required. The armchair version (B64) extends the tubular frame to support wooden armrests. Later in Breuer’s career, when he was designing houses, he regularly incorporated traditional materials such as fieldstone and rough slate, leading Philip Johnson to quip that Breuer was a “peasant mannerist.” The enduring appeal of the Cesca Chair derives fr
om a similar combination of tradition with innovation, shaped wood and woven cane with shiny steel. Starting over, but also looking back.
MR10 cantilever chair (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe)
Cesca Chair (Marcel Breuer)
Although the MR10 and the Cesca were acclaimed by modernist architects, tubular steel furniture was not a runaway commercial success. According to Christopher Wilk of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the royalties paid by Thonet to Breuer suggest that “sales may not have amounted to more than a few hundred pieces a year.” The 1920s did see an unexpected revival of early Thonet bentwood chairs, thanks largely to their newfound popularity among the architectural avant-garde. Le Corbusier, for example, was a great admirer of bentwood chairs. One of his favorites was the No. B9 Schreibtischfauteuil, a writing armchair with a circular seat and arms that curved into the circular backrest. Le Corbusier’s work was well publicized, and Thonet’s bentwood furniture—much of which was now more than fifty years old—became associated with the radical new architecture.
Now I Sit Me Down Page 10
