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Modern Furniture and Tubular metal
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Modern Furniture and the use of Tubular Metal A Short History The history of tubular metal furniture begins in earnest in 1909 when an Italian manufacturing company called Dalmine began manufacturing seamless steel tubes commercially. Thus making tubular metal truly accessible and inexpensive. The Bauhaus era Modernist designers were fervent adherents to the cause of 'Design for the masses' - making this and other durable, light weight and inexpensive materials like molded plywood - their favored media. Manufacturing of this new material spread worldwide through the first half of the 20th Century. In 1914 a Japanese company called Nippon Kokan Kabushiki-gaisha (NKK) began manufacturing seamless steel tubes, and in 1954 two manufacturing companies opened in Latin America - Tamsa in Mexico and Siderca in Argentina But it was back in Europe that the potential of this material for interior furnishings was first explored and exploited. In the 1920's Charlotte Perriand decided that she wanted to incorporate new modern materials in furniture design. Shunning the Beaux-art style with its classical ornamentation; swags, garlands and columns she chose a radical and courageous new approach. She turned her garret style Parisian apartment into a workshop and proceeded to design and build metal tubular furniture, out of chrome and aluminum for a "machine age interior". In 1927, having designed and built enough work for an exhibition, she held a show at the Salon D'Automne. Her rooftop bar design and its furnishings created quite a stir, and ultimately prompted Le Corbusier to hire her as a furniture designer for his Atelier. Le Corbusier asked that she design furniture that was an extension of the human body.. "object-members" were intended to serve specific human needs. And so it was that she designed a chair for conversation - the B301 fauteuil dossier or 'slingback chair',
a chair for relaxation -
LC2 Grand Confort, was the square-shaped leather upholstered chunky armchair
LC2 Grand Confort
and a chair for sleeping -
B306 chaise lounge.
All three employed tubular metal for the supporting frame, with leather seats and backs.
In 1926 Mart Stam design a prototype of his classic tubular metal Cantilever Chair, and took it to a conference in Berlin. This immediately inspired other furniture designers including Mies Van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, Marcel Breuer, and Eileen Gray to design their own cantilever, and / or tubular metal furniture. Mies and Reich designed the
Brno Canteliver Armchair,
Breuer designed the
Wassily Armchair
and
nesting side tables
and Eileen Gray designed her classic
tubular metal side table,
The 1933 Chicago World's Fair exhibited a large number of pieces of tubular steel furniture. The use of steel was advertised at the fair as, "natural, therefore that the modern spirit should express itself in striking, radically different kinds of furniture and that furniture should be of steel, for this is the age of steel, and steel sounds the keynote of practicability, energy, and strength which dominates our modern life." Companies, such as the Chicago and Grand Rapids Co. of Michigan, immediately began producing large quantities of tubular steel furniture. American industrial designer Donald Deskey designed a line of metal furniture, (better known perhaps for designing the Crest Toothpaste packaging, Tide BullsEye logo and Radio City Music Hall interior. His furniture was mass-produced around 1930 by the Ypsilanti Reed Furniture Co. A 1930 ad for the company pointed out that Ypsilanti Reed had pioneered steel furniture in America, "and in less than two years has assumed outstanding leadership in style and quality in this singular furniture." By 1933 the Howell Co. of Geneva, Illinois, began mass-producing tubular steel furniture, including the best-selling "Beta," a chrome-plated, tubular steel and upholstered chair, as well as other innovative chair forms, such as the "S" chairs, with their bent metal frames, that were produced and sold in high volume throughout the 1930s. Famous industrial designer Gilbert Rohde was among the first American innovators who worked with bent metal to create innovative furniture designs. His earliest tubular steel design was manufactured by the Troy Sunshade Co. of Troy, Ohio, in 1931. Because the company had additional offices in Amsterdam and Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Rohde's designs were sold in Europe as well. The Kroehler Manufacturing Co. of Chicago, Illinois, also employed Rohde, who designed furniture not only from tubular steel, but from stainless steel, aluminum, and chrome. Rohde's pieces were advertised by the company as "functional and modern" with "a hygienic quality (no nooks and crannies to conceal dirt) that reduced dusting to a minimum while retaining their luster without the drudgery of polishing." By 1930 Rohde moved on to take over design leadership for the Herman Miller Furniture Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan. With Rohde at its helm, the company began an extensive program to produce modern furnishings, most of which incorporated the use of bent metal elements in many of their designs. In fact, throughout the decade leading up to World War II, the Herman Miller Co. continued to increasingly produce bent metal furnishings designed by Rohde. Although metal furniture was seen as innovative by the American public, American designers, such as Rohde, owed a great debt to their European counterparts during the decades between the two world wars. Some of the most copied modern tubular steel furniture designs belonged to Marcel Breuer, the avant-garde designer, and were originally created while he was at the Bauhaus, the German experimental design school, as early as 1925. With the dissemination of European tubular steel designs to a wider world market and manufacturers producing their own interpretations of bent metal furniture, the originality and inventiveness of design had largely ended by the early years of the 1940s. After World War II, profound changes in design and manufacturing moved the center of progressive development of metal furniture from Europe to the United States. Charles and Ray Eames, a husband and wife team of industrial designers, helped to develop new, and even more innovative, metal furniture designs for the Herman Miller Co. in the 1940s and 1950s. But with the increasing use of plastics for home furnishings the popularity of tubular metal declined - retaining its market only in the budget and office furnishing niche. The first years of the 21st century have seen a re emergence of tubular steel and indeed cantilever chairs, such as the Sue and Daniela. |
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