Among the myriad advantages of global industry that are also problems of global industry is, inarguably, that of centralised production with subsequent international distribution. And that of a popular unquestioning, unthinking, blithe acceptance of the...
...The result is a collection of some 80 chairs at various locations throughout the Dessau Bauhaus building and in the foyer of the Bauhaus Museum Dessau; some 80 chairs composing a juxtaposition of licenced works through Knoll, Thonet and Tecta, including the B3 'Wassily' club chair by Marcel Breuer, the S533 R by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or the D4 by Marcel Breuer, of plagiarisms of those licensed works, and also of alternative interpretations of those licensed works by furniture retail chains such as Ikea or XXXLutz and designers such as Jasper Morrison... The latter a question also posed by the inclusion in Mehr als echt (More than real) of the S 43 cantilever chair by Mart Stam through Thonet, a work without question of importance in context of the (hi)story of furniture and of Functionalist Modernism, but a work, as with all works of Stam, that has as much to do with Bauhaus as this blog...
...A brief tour through the recent (hi)story of chair design, or certainly western European chair design, that opens with Michael Thonet's 1859 Chair 14, the contemporary Thonet Chair 214, a... , but a work that also redefined chair production: Thonet's warm bentwood process negating the need for skilled carpenters, relying instead on a workforce of highly trained but otherwise unskilled labour, and thereby, essentially, marking the dawn of industrialised furniture production...
...In addition the furniture chapter presents, and as one of very, very few works and creatives on show not directly associated with the Bauhauses, and thus an object whose presence is initially very confusing, a Thonet KS 46 by, strongly attributed to, Anton Lorenz, a steel tube cantilever chair that we first became acquainted with in a photo on show at Power Space Violence... A Thonet KS 46 steel tube cantilever chair of which an example, not the one on show in Weimar, but a Thonet KS 46, was part of the furnishing at Berchtesgaden, Hitler's famed and fabled mountain retreat...
Established in Munich in 2020 by Max Neustadt, an alumni of the Technische Hochschule Rosenheim and ECAL, Lausanne, with periods working with Nils Holger Moormann and Stefan Diez on his CV, Edition 33 have a, for us, agreeably responsible and sustainable...
Born in Aschaffenburg, Bayern, on March 30th 1938 into a family of small traders, her mother's family running a butchery, her father operating a drugstore, Dorothee Becker enjoyed, a, by all accounts, happy, comfortable, childhood on the Bavarian/Hessen...
There is an argument to be made, indeed one we will make here without offering any evidence, we'll save that for another day, there is an argument to be made that some of the earliest forbearers, if not the earliest forbearers, of our contemporary side chairs...
