...The smow Pinnacle: Jil Sander x Thonet – Silenzioso, Chiaro, Straordinario To round things off, Design Week took us to an almost meditative space: Thonet's presentation of its new collaboration with the renowned designer Jil Sander... For all those who have fallen in love as much as we have: The Jil Sander x Thonet collection is already available in our shop...
...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...
...In addition Ferdinand Kramer realised numerous furniture projects in cooperation with Thonet, most famously arguably being his B403 bentwood chair, while in context of his tenure at Frankfurt University Ferdinand Kramer designed, pretty much, all the furniture and furnishings... This process, which today is particularly important, is not only historically interesting: it alone explains the immense sales of the Thonet industry, and provides a very interesting reference for the further development of rationalisation in the furniture industry...
