Hans Coray

Hans Coray

The Swiss artist and furniture designer Hans Coray was born in 1906 in Wald, in the canton of Zurich. Before Coray, who along with Max Bill or Hans Fischli was associated with the Dada movement and the Zürcher Konkret, turned mainly to art and design, he achieved a Doctor title in 1929 in Romanic languages. From the beginning of the 1930s he worked autodidactically with metal and wire processing and applied them to furniture designs and sculptures. Following a proposal by Hans Fischli, Coray developed two prototypes for the official chair of the Swiss National Exhibition in 1939: chairs which should be light, graceful, stackable and friendly in expression. The resulting aluminium Landi chair was a milestone in the history of design, then uniquely innovative and reissued by Vitra some 75 years later. Coray, a pioneer in industrial design, and for all functional, simple furniture increasingly turned to painting and sculpture throughout the course of the 1950s.

Designer Hans Coray