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Thonet Chairs

Thonet chairs in the Thonet production in Frankenberg/Eder

The German furniture manufacturer Thonet stands for furniture of the highest quality, and for all the Thonet chairs are considered endearing design classics. Thonet chairs can be roughly divided into two historic groupings: bentwood and tubular steel cantilever. The bentwood chairs were developed in the late 19th century by Michael Thonet, the tubular steel cantilevers come from the Bauhaus era in the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to their historic programme, Thonet also produce contemporary chair designs, including, for example, the 404 by Stefan Diez or the bar stool S 123 by James Irvine. Among the best known Thonet classic chairs are the so-called coffee house chair 214 by Michael Thonet from 1859 , the S 43 Classic by Mart Stam (1931) and the S 32 / S 64 by Marcel Breuer (1929-30).

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Monobloc by Hauke Wendler

With furniture, as with so much in life, it is rarely the showy, high profile, works, or individuals, that teach us most, but those works, and those individuals, who in their anonymity and modesty accompany us in invisible silence. Or rather the anonymous and...

Sitting reconsidered. Design, Observe, Stage at the Burg Galerie, Halle

...Originating in context of, and presented parallel to, the exhibition Chairs: Dieckmann!... de/burg-galerie/ Chairs: Dieckmann!...

Chairs: Dieckmann! The Forgotten Bauhäusler Erich Dieckmann at Neuwerk 11, Halle

..."1 With the exhibition Chairs: Dieckmann!... 2 And indeed unlike Junge Dieckmann was a member of the NSDAP; and as Aya Soika convincingly discusses in the Chairs: Dieckmann!...

Bentwood and Beyond. Thonet and Modern Furniture Design @ the MAK – Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna

...For our part we were particularly perturbed by the claim in the section on Plastic Chairs that the high sales figures for Gerd Lange's early 1970s Flex 2000 indicate that "Thonet had its finger on the pulse of the plastic age" If there's one thing the Thonet (hi)story teaches us it is that "plastic age" (largely) passed them by, that having established the company on two material/technological innovations they missed a third, lest we forget, which we can't because they are two examples in the exhibition, in the 1950s & 60s Thonet cooperated with Verner Panton on wooden chairs, you do the math... A state of affairs Bentwood and Beyond with its inter-twinned specific and general discussions on 200 years of modern furniture design very convincingly, satisfyingly, underscores and reinforces; despite moments such as Plastic Chairs or Super Normal Bentwood and Beyond isn't a hagiographic celebration of Thonet, but a series of reflections on Thonet in context of wider realities, a series of reflections on the (hi)story of furniture design and the path to our contemporary furniture understandings through the conduit of Thonet, and for all an exhibition which tends to underscore and reinforce the truism that continually evolving social, cultural, economic, technical, et al realities not only carries design forth but defines, and continually redefines, our relationships to our objects of daily use, demanding the new, discarding the obsolete, the foolish, the faddish while preserving, nurturing, certain universal archetypes as it rolls onwards...


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