Halyard

/

PK25 by Poul Kjærholm 1951

detail of Flag Halyrad Chair by Hans Wegner 1950

 

Halyard or rope was used in a number of chairs in the 1950s and 1960s, and not just for garden or terrace furniture.

It was most-often used in its natural colour so a grey/brown or buff of the jute used to make the rope although some designs were and are offered with the rope dyed black.

Modern versions of these chairs use halyard with the jute wrapped around a nylon core for a stronger rope and to minimise stretching.

The way the rope is strung across a seat or seat and back varies so either threaded through holes - as on the Deck Chair or recliner by Hans Wegner from 1958 - or, more often, tightly spaced and wrapped over the frame - as with paper cord - or the rope can be knotted at intervals along the frame and formed into a net rather like a hammock with the ropes interwoven in a diamond pattern and possibly with cleats or metal loops that act as spacers.

Through his career Hans Wegner used rope or halyard on some of his largest and most dramatic chairs including the Flag Halyard Chair in 1950, the Hammock Chair pp135 from 1967, Rocking Chair pp124 from 1984 and Circle Chair from 1986.

Poul Kjærholm used halyard for the seat and back of Chair PK25 designed in 1951; for the wooden chair made by Thorvald Madsens Snedkerier that was designed in 1952 and for the small and light dining chair PK3 that Kjærholm designed in 1956.

 

Danish chairs of the 20th century

/
 

Over the Autumn of 2017, just over 60 separate posts were added to the site to look at Danish chairs from the last century with a brief assessment of each that focused on details about the form and the construction and, where possible, put the design of each into a wider context.

A third of these chairs were designed by Hans Wegner and that reflects the number of chairs he designed through a long career but also, of course, his importance as a master of innovation who, as a designer, continually pushed the boundaries for what could be done and how and why.

The series was inspired by the chairs in the permanent collection of Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen where a new display was opened just over a year ago.

With a selection of chairs from the permanent collection of the museum now shown in a well-lit arrangement in a dedicated gallery where the chairs are set, each in its own display case, it is possible to look at each design without distraction and, with the chairs raised up off the floor, it is possible to look closely at how the chairs are constructed and to appreciate the techniques of the carpentry - the way that the separate parts are cut, shaped and fitted together - the finish of the wood, the use of metal for parts of the chair or, with some chairs, the whole frame, the development of new materials such as plywood or plastic and, with many of the chairs, the superb quality of the workmanship. 

In the museum, the chairs are grouped by type to introduce visitors to the idea of different forms of construction … and because it suggests trends and technical developments, that is more important than more vague classifications by style or period and certainly more important than a simple sequence by date.

This new gallery presents to the visitor a key body of research material on open access with extensive labels and information panels but in addition the museum catalogue is available on line so it is possible there to look up furniture in the collection by date, period, maker, materials and type and the index also means that it is possible to search for cross references to more information or images of other furniture by the same designer or the same maker that is not currently on display but is in the reserve collection.

It was also crucial for these recent posts here, on this web site, that last year saw the republication of the four volumes on the cabinetmakers' annual exhibitions - Dansk Mobelkunst Gennem 40 År - published by Lindhardt og Ringhof.

Edited by the designer Grete Jalk, these were published first in 1987 and record exhibitions that were held in Copenhagen each year, from 1927 through to 1966, to show the public the latest and the very best of Danish furniture.

For the first decade, the exhibitions were held at different venues in Copenhagen but, from 1937 through to the last exhibition in 1966, all but one year when the exhibition was at Charlottenborg and one year at the Forum - a total of 28 exhibitions were held at the design museum. This was remarkable and emphasises the important role that the museum had and the museum still has in showing current design - not simply to curate the design of the past - and one reason why the present exhibition Dansk Design Nu - looking at Danish design this century - is so important.

With posts here on 60 chairs, and the intention to add more, then some sort of index was necessary and arranging that by date also works as a simple time line for chairs from the 20th century. Using the search feature of the site or the categories and tags it is possible to search by designer or cabinet maker. At the very least, this proves that there was not a clear or straightforward linear progress through those decades and it suggests interesting questions about the age of designers or at which point in their career they produced a specific chair and whether, whatever their age, they were pushing boundaries or exploring for themselves a new trend or a new material.

 

The display of chairs in Designmuseum Danmark provides an amazing opportunity to not only look at the chairs up close but the lighting also meant, for me, that it is possible to look at the details - to look at how the chairs are constructed - and take photographs. Recording details of the joinery and the materials is important as fewer and fewer people learn about timber or work with wood when they are at school and it is not an aspect of design covered in many blogs but understanding how a chair is constructed reveals much about how or why a chair has a certain or a distinct look and how that relates to other chairs of the same form. 

For obvious reasons the measurements of the chairs have been given where possible because it is important to have some way of judging the scale of a design and that is rarely obvious from a photograph and particularly difficult if the photograph shows the chair without the context of a room.

But also, as I looked at more and more of the chairs and looked at the photographs from the cabinetmakers' annual exhibitions, it was clear that it is now difficult to understand these pieces of furniture in anything like an original setting and that becomes more difficult with time as many of these pieces of furniture move from being everyday objects that people have in their homes and sit on to be what are now valuable collector or museum pieces.

Some of the designers and architects themselves were clearly concerned about the setting of their furniture. From the first exhibitions in the late 1920s the cabinetmakers used room settings and much of the furniture was also aimed at a specific customer and therefore, to some extent, a known type of room … from a young couple moving into a small, new, two-room apartment through to a wealthy middle-class family buying bookshelves and a desk by Klint or chairs for a large terrace or garden … so all the chairs were designed with at least some idea of the space or the setting where the furniture would be used. 

Some designers went further. Poul Kjærholm designed with meticulous care the settings of his furniture in exhibitions and shop displays and Finn Juhl chose the colours against which his furniture was shown by producing drawings with colour wash of the room settings for the Cabinetmakers' Exhibition.

This first selection has focused on key chairs of the classic period of modern Danish furniture, so with just 60 that is not, at this point, even all the most famous chairs but at least a reasonable selection of different types of chair and different materials and a range of designers. 

One obvious problem is that this panders to the idea that Danish designers focus on chairs and it reinforces a general misconception that somehow the only period of great design in Denmark was that so-called Classic period of the 1950s and 1960s.

Therefore, the next stage for this web site will be to look at recent chairs, since the turn of the century, and present them in a similar way … looking at form and construction and context … and possibly then to look at other types of Danish furniture in the same way … so sofas and tables might be next.

This should form a growing body of material with a chance to experiment with indexing and cross referencing and posts will be updated to add to entries if more information or better photographs become available or to add more links to archive drawings and historic images.

 
First posted on 31st December 2017
INDEX to the posts on chairs from the 20th century

Chairs at Designmuseum Danmark

/
 
 

looking at chairs to left or right or above or below you can see how a shape or type of chair evolved or how a form can be re-interpreted in a different material

At Designmuseum Danmark there is a relatively new display for their collection of modern chairs where the chairs are arranged by type rather than by designer or by displaying the chairs in chronological order. 

This typography puts the chairs into relatively distinct and easily identified groups where each group is defined by a form or shape and by the style of a chair … the form of the chair, techniques of working with a material and details of construction and style, all being closely interrelated.

Most of the chairs shown date from the 20th century and were made by Danish cabinetmakers or Danish manufacturers although several older chairs, several more recent Danish chairs and some chairs from outside Denmark have been included where they provide evidence for how or why or when a specific Danish design evolved or if they are relevant evidence from a specific or wider social or historic context.

Most of the chairs are made in wood but there are chairs with frames in metal tube and there are metal wire and even plastic chairs so there are interesting examples where closely-related designs - in terms of style and shape - can be seen in tube-metal alongside a version in bent-wood although obviously the techniques and the details of construction are very different.

The main groups, defined by the museum, are Folding chairs and stools; Easy chairs - so generally lower and wider chairs - and Windsor chairs - with vertical spindles across the back to support the top rail or - in taller chairs - a head rest. Chippendale chairs have a sturdy frame of square-set legs - usually with stretchers between the legs and a relatively low back and when they have arms these are housed into the uprights of the back. There is a group derived from Shaker chairs, from America - often with horizontal slats across the back rest. Chinese chairs and steam-bent chairs, are similar to the Chippendale Chairs but are distinct in terms of the sitting position which is more upright and more formal and generally the top of the back rail sweeps round into arm rests as a single curve rather than in separate pieces. Round arm chairs and Klismos chairs also have curved and relatively low back rests that continue round into arm rests - with  The Chair by Hans Wegner perhaps the most famous Danish example. A Klismos or Klismos Chair is a distinct classical or Greek type with a short but sharply-curved back rest across the top of the back uprights with legs that are usually tapered and splay out down to the floor in a curve. Shell chairs include chairs in moulded or shaped plywood, moulded plastic or metal with shapes that provide - usually in one piece - the support for the seat and back without a framework, and are usually on a separate frame of legs or on a pedestal, that itself can be made from a different material to the shell, although there are shell chairs where seat, back and support are all moulded. Moulded chairs with a shell in foam or plastic first appeared commercially in the 1950s and moulded plastic chairs have by this century become almost ubiquitous in the collections of most Danish manufacturers. The final group identified by the museum are Cantilever chairs where normally there is a strong base on the floor and some form of support for the front of the seat but no legs or support under the back of the seat - an interesting but not a common type in Denmark. 

chair by PV Jensen Klint circa 1910

armchair by Kaare Klint 1922

JH505 the Cow Horn Chair by Hans Wegner 1952

Ant shell chair by Arne Jacobsen 1951

EKC12 in tubular steel by Poul Kjærholm 1962

PK15 by Poul Kjærholm 1978

all in the collection of Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen

 

The study and analysis of chair designs from different periods has been an important part of the training for designers in Danish schools of architecture and schools of design for a century.  

In the 1920s, the architect Kaare Klint was responsible for the conversion and the fittings of the buildings of an 18th-century hospital to form an appropriate exhibition space for the museum of Danish design - then called the Kunstindustrimuseet Danmark. Klint taught design in the museum where he encouraged architects and furniture designers to study and draw historic pieces and to study and appreciate cabinet making techniques even if they were not craftsmen themselves and he emphasised the close relationship between design and the techniques of construction.

This division of chair types in the design museum is different from the groups set out by Nicolai de Gier and Stine Liv Buur in their important book Chairs' Tectonics where their primary divisions are by material and then by the form and structure … so they look specifically at how the seat, back rest and support or legs are joined or fixed together and take that as the starting point for their classification of chair types.

Designerof the new display: Boris Berlin of ISKOS-BERLIN Copenhagen

Curator of the collection: Christian Holmsted Olesen.
Graphic design: Rasmus Koch Studio.
Light design: Jørgen Kjær/Cowi Light Design and Adalsteinn Stefansson.
Graphic design: Rasmus Koch Studio.

 

note:

this was initially posted on the 2 October but has been moved up to make a more-sensible introduction to the series of posts about chairs posted through October 2017. The chairs were selected because they are important examples from major Danish designers but they also cover all the types of chair in the design museum typology.

These posts on chairs are also an experiment for this site in trying to present more photographs and slightly more information than is normal in a blog to highlight and analyse key features of each design. 

Selecting the category a Danish chair will take you to all the posts in the sequence in which they were posted and there is also a new time line to form an index to these posts:

 

Designmuseum Danmark on-line catalogue

/
 
 

Designmuseum Danmark can only display a proportion of their collection and, even when an object is shown in a gallery or exhibition, there is usually a limit to how much information can be included on a label or in a leaflet or guide so the on-line catalogue of the museum is an amazing desk-top resource for finding out more about an object or more about a designer or a manufacturer.

There is a separate index for the museum's collection of furniture and this can be searched by category or by a specific year or a decade; by the name of the designer or the cabinetmaker / manufacturer or with key words and the search can be narrowed down by selecting, for instance, a type of wood from a drop-down list.

 

Inevitably, the amount of information revealed through the search varies slightly from object to object - the museum points out that the catalogue is being updated as new information becomes available - but there is usually a photograph and often several view points, and there are dimensions; materials; usually a date of acquisition and - if the piece was purchased by the museum rather than given as a gift - there is often the name of the auction house and a date because sale catalogues can be an important source for more information. Particularly for what is called provenance so the history of ownership for a more important or a more unusual work. For major objects there can be a specific bibliography if it has been included in a publication or an exhibition catalogue. 

Designmuseum Danmark on-line site was redesigned recently and the catalogue of the collection can now be found from the front page by following the options or links:

Designmuseum Danmark home page / Library / Search in the collections / Furniture Index

Dansk Møbelkunst gennem 40 År

/
 

40 years of Danish Furniture Design - The Copenhagen Cabinet-makers’ Guild Exhibitions

In four volumes: 1927-1936, 1937-1946, 1947-1956 and 1957-1966

Compiled and edited by Greta Jalk - first published in 1987 and republished by Lindhart og Ringhof in 2017

 

a living room and study with furniture by the cabinetmaker Andersen & Bohm that was shown at the exhibition in 1928

these volumes of Dansk Møbelkunst Gennem 40 År are so important because they record just how and how quickly the work of the cabinet makers changed through even the first years of the exhibitions

This is a major reference work - not just for the history of modern Danish furniture design and the design of homes but these volumes, compiled by Greta Jalk, are also a record of social history - recording much about how Danish families lived or wanted to live through that period of massive changes in the middle of the 20th century - and the volumes indicate much about Danish business and the way that Danish design, through this period, was marketed.

There is a forward and a general introduction but otherwise the volumes are set out year by year with contemporary photographs of the furniture shown at each exhibition, along with some technical drawings. There are images of the covers of the exhibition catalogues - themselves giving an insight into Danish typography and graphic design through this period - and quotations from contemporary reviews of the furniture.

By the 1920s a widespread economic Depression across Europe was having a marked effect on independent furniture makers and on the furniture trade in Copenhagen and to compound the problem, there was a clear change in the way people were living, so a change in what furniture they needed, with a growing number of people living in smaller apartments in the large number of new apartment blocks that were being built around the city.

 
 

Trade and craft guilds from the medieval period onwards had been formed to oversee the training of apprentices and to protect craftsmen and their work in their own cities - guilds were based in cities and towns - and to monitor and, where necessary, restrict competition. Usually the guilds also provided support for widows and retired craftsmen. Through the 19th century, in major historic cities in Europe, these craft guilds began to loose their relevance as methods of production, of all sorts of goods from glassware to furniture, moved from small workshops that served a district or a town or a city to larger and larger factories. So it is ironic that Denmark, producing now some of the best and most highly regarded modern furniture, does so in part because it’s old craft guilds survived longer than elsewhere and fought back and in the process adapted and changed. 

There is one further anomaly in Denmark that has possibly not received enough attention. The late 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century was a period of considerable prosperity in Copenhagen with a huge expansion of the city after the demolition of the old city defences following the potentially disastrous war with Germany and then with the completion and opening of the Free Port so there was a massive demand for furniture and household goods … all those new apartments around Israels Plads or out from Østerport or spreading south through Islands Brygge had to be furnished. There were still wealthy middle-class families in the city buying good and expensive furniture but there was a phenomenal growth in the number of professional. middle class and increasingly prosperous working families who were occupying new or relatively new apartments that all had to be furnished.

The economic depression of the 1920s marked a real change and a real challenge so the first Cabinetmakers’ Exhibition in 1927 was organised as a way of demonstrating the skills of the furniture makers in the city and to bolster sales or, rather, to revive flagging sales.

From consecutive years an unusual idea … a square card table and chairs with sharply-curved backs set on an angle so when they were pushed in they form a scallop arrangement. The table and chairs shown in 1960 had been designed by Kaare Klint in 1935 and examples of the same design in mahogany were shown in 1946 and 1948. This version in rosewood was produced to commemorate the work of Klint who died in 1954. Svend Eriiksen wrote that “The tradition established by Klint is tenacious and durable. It will take vigorous effort to keep it alive” and the critic from Jyllands Posten wrote of this furniture that “they still stand out as some of the finest pieces to have been made in this country.”

Initially, the exhibitions were held in different venues each year but at an early stage room settings rather than simple display stands were built. Clearly, the aim was to show people, particularly young couples, how they might furnish a new home and they encouraged people to see furniture made by cabinetmakers as not just for the wealthy upper middle classes but as a sensible source for well-made furniture for a broad range of families.

In the second year, in 1928, there was a crucial change when cabinetmakers began to collaborate with architects and furniture was shown that had been designed by Viggo Sten Møller and Kay Gottlob and a sideboard was shown that was designed by Kaare Klint that was made by the cabinetmaker Otto Meyer. 

That set a pattern and - to use a pun deliberately - that set the bench mark for the next forty years. These partnerships established a significant precedence where designs and styles evolved - not just through discussion amongst the cabinetmakers but year on year as a response to what the market wanted.

This room from 1944 included Chair NV44 designed by Finn Juhl and made by Niels Vodder. The side table is interesting with an integral hot plate to keep food warm. Reviews were critical - one pointed out that “The table was a new and interesting kind of extension table; but it seemed as if its design was not really related to that of the other furniture”  and another thought “the curved chairs are nice to look at and comfortable - but the cost of making it.”

 

Obviously, this furniture, shown by the cabinetmakers, can not be completely representative of all furniture made through this period and nor was it all successful. Some cabinetmakers were more adventurous than others … some produced amazing pieces of furniture that were not widely appreciated while other designs went on to achieve commercial success and some pieces are still produced and sold today.

The photographs and drawings in these volumes show how the way of life in the city for many changed through this period so, for instance, large cupboards for storing 12 or more place settings for formal dining disappear and tables and dining chairs become more compact. There were few beds shown - presumably for the simple reason that people don’t buy beds too often - but towards the later years there was more and more furniture for the garden or balcony.

from 1962 bar stools in rosewood designed by Mary Beatrice Bloch and beds in teak designed by the Icelandic designer Gunnar Magnusson made by Christensen and Larsen. The sofa, chairs and combined dining table work table are also in teak, designed by Steffen Syrach-Larsen and made by the cabinetmaker Gustav Bertelsen & Co..

 

What you see, above all through these 40 years, is how the shapes and styles of chairs and tables and cupboards become simpler visually so superfluous decoration of any kind disappears. 

That is not to suggest that the furniture compromised quality by becoming more basic so cheaper to produce. Actually the opposite. As clear form and shape become more and more important in Danish design then there is nowhere for shoddy workmanship to hide. If there was any extravagance or bravado it was through using more expensive imported timbers such as walnut or teak but there was always a focus on quality of workmanship to demonstrate mastery of woodworking techniques. 

Nor is that an implication that the cabinetmakers were defensive or protectionist or reactionary because many of the pieces shown at the exhibition involved new methods of construction that required new machines and jigs and new ways of working with wood - many of the most adventurous designs by Hans Wegner or Finn Juhl would have been impossible to make without new techniques for shaping, bending and joining wood.

Furniture makers were moving from the workbench to the idea of the larger workshop or factory where larger numbers of each piece could be made so these exhibitions were less and less about the one-off commission - although those must have been welcome - but more and more about the establishment of an outward-looking and successful furniture industry. 

L1240373.jpg
 

Chair designed by Jørgen Høvelskov and made by the cabinetmaker J H Johansens was shown in 1966.

One critic wrote “…The purpose in exhibiting at the cabinetmakers’ furniture exhibition is either to show furniture of supreme quality or or to suggest future solutions by means of experiments. There are one or two examples of these experiments such as the chair designed by Jørgen Høvelskov and made by Henning Jensen. It is intended to be very simple with a frame threaded with heavy cord, but unfortunately the total impression is anything but simple. The chair seems confused and unfinished, and it is correspondingly uncomfortable.”

 

surely a chair is just a chair?

/

the teaching collection at KADK - Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademis Skoler for Arkitektur, Design og Konservering

If the title of this post had been something like "a discussion of residual symbols of power and poverty apparent in the design of seating in the period of transition from independent cabinetmakers to industrial production in modern Denmark" then many, quite reasonably, would not have swiped right.

But ……..

In the west, and particularly in northern Europe, although we seem to live in an increasingly secular age and tend to downplay or dismiss symbolism, it still plays a strong part in how our society is organised and functions. Of all the types of furniture we use, it is chairs that seem to be charged with the most meanings. 

Even at a simple level, a photograph of chairs set on either side of a fireplace are still a strong symbol of hospitality suggesting the warmth and comfort of the hearth at the centre of a home but then chairs can be symbolic of aspects of life that are much less warm and cosy …..

A legal court or parliament when it is in session sits or is sitting and the chair of the judge or the Speaker of the parliament is the focus of the whole room.

In a university professors have a Chair in their faculty and, in a business meeting, to 'take the chair' is to take control.

Companies have leaders or heads but they are often referred to as the 'chairman' of the board of the company and when a new director is appointed they have a place on the board but it is usually described in English as 'a seat on the board.'

A Cathedral is the Seat of the Bishop and the See of the Bishop or Holy See is taken from sedes as in sedia or chair and ironically that is the same starting point for the English word sedentary from spending too much time in a chair. The actual chair of the bishop - some form of obvious throne, or chair on steroids - can be given emphasis by being placed under a canopy as a symbol of authority as if having the biggest and best and most expensive chair in the place was not enough.

Grand Medieval households were often arranged with separate tables for different levels or hierarchies within the family and its servants for dining and the high or posh table had at the centre a large chair for the owner or 'head' of the house while long tables in the 'body' of the hall would have had benches for less important people. This simply reflects that a well made chair was expensive and therefore special.

In English politics most official photographs of government ministers at cabinet meetings show the Prime Minister sitting at the centre of the long side as a symbol of collective government … although that does not appear to be working too well at the moment.

Chairs can be used to draw someone into a group - so you invite someone to 'pull up a chair' or to 'just grab a seat' if you are distracted by something or someone else but want to keep them in the room. But you can do just the opposite … put them in their place or make them feel excluded by making someone stand while you sit.And simply sitting down on a chair or standing up can be used to control a complex situation so in a legal court people might have to stand when the judge enters the room and cannot sit down again until after they are seated and when someone in charge stands up it can signal the end of a meeting.Even in the home this sort of control can be used so a child behaving badly might be made to get down from the table, so feels excluded, or as a deliberate punishment made to stay at the table.

Chairs and seats reflect status so someone might want the 'best seats in the house' when they go to the theatre or economise by booking something up in the cheap seats.

You can stand behind someone who is sitting down and lean over them to intimidate them.

Or, just the opposite, you can give them or put them in the hot seat.

And not just the chairs themselves but the arrangement of chairs can be important so lines of chairs or better an arc of chairs can focus attention on a lectern and even in democratic Denmark the cathedral in Copenhagen has an interesting arrangement with a royal pew up in a gallery, above everyone else, looking directly across at the preacher standing, but not sitting but with a canopy so both his words and his status are clear so this is a play of power on who is sitting above whom.

Think of the game for children where there is one chair less than the number of players who circle until music stops and the one who fails to get a chair is out and a chair is removed before the game continues until it is just two fighting, often literally fighting, for that last chair.

To 'send someone to The Chair' means executing them in an electric chair and when someone is interrogated they might be tied to the chair or simply held under a spotlight with the interrogators walking around …. Just think about the closing scene in the film Brazil and you can see the symbolism of power and complete loss symbolised in a single isolated chair.

On the whole, of course, modern Danish chairs are not quite that powerful but then Wegner's Round Chair had an important role in the Nixon Kennedy interview, and almost certainly the most prestigious commission won by Finn Juhl was to design chairs for the United Nations building in New York and there is that iconic photo of Christine Keeler, the maker of spies and the breaker of political reputations, naked and sitting the wrong way round on a Chair 7 … OK it's a fake version of the Jacobsen chair but oddly that makes it somehow even more symbolic.

why does Denmark produce so many 'good' chairs?

/

the display of the collection of chairs at Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen

 

Chairs are a common pieces of furniture in most modern homes around the world but the chair has a special - almost an iconic place - in the history of modern design in Denmark.

At the design museum in Copenhagen, in a relatively new gallery, chairs from their collection are each given their own space; each elevated and each given spotlights that are set to come on as you approach.

Don't get me wrong … this is not a criticism … actually far far from a criticism because by lifting the chairs up from their normal place - on the floor with and amongst other furniture - you can appreciate the different designs; you can look at the details and see how the chairs are put together; and with the chairs arranged in groups you begin to see how they fit into a context or a sequence of similar or of very different chairs and, above all, you can see how well made most of them are … so they certainly deserve our attention.

But then take a step back … so why so many different beautiful chairs and from a relatively short period of time? - most in the gallery date from the period from 1930 to the last decade of the last century - and why so many chairs from a relatively small country?

They receive well-deserved acclaim and not just in Denmark but internationally - so much so that these chairs are widely imitated and, in some cases, they are copied so carefully that some are passed off as originals. Some chairs from the 1950s and 1960s, by certain designers, now achieve almost eye-watering amounts of money in auctions. And yet they were all made simply so that we can sit down.

read more

 

country furniture

/

country furniture in buildings at Frilandsmuseet - the open-air museum north of Copenhagen

 

In Denmark traditional country furniture is called bondemøbler or peasant furniture and in England this is called cottage or farmhouse furniture or by some academics vernacular furniture.

These are the chairs and tables and cupboards and beds made before the industrial revolution and before the retail revolution of the 19th century by families themselves or by local carpenters who would use local materials - so where possible oak or, as oak became less easily available and more expensive, then other local timber including ash or pine. The use of expensive foreign timber is rare in country furniture, for obvious reasons, and highly finished and polished surfaces or veneer were beyond the abilities of local makers unless they worked in a relatively large market town and had a large workshop and wood was left untreated or furniture was either finished with simple wax or oil, to protect the surfaces, or could be painted and decorated. 

Upholstery was also an expensive job that required a specialist so seats were either simply flat wood planks or possibly wood hollowed out but rush and cane or even rope were used woven over a frame for chair seats. Simple seat cushions could be made from a tough fabric with a filling of straw or animal hair - using the same materials and techniques as making a mattress.

living in a single room - Den Gamle By - the open-air museum in Aarhus - note the bed in a drawer under the settle or bench

 

Wood for chair and table legs and for the spindles of a chair back or for stretchers between the legs - to make a stronger frame - could be turned on a simple lathe and in England these lathes were often set up out in beech woods and the finished turned legs and spindles were brought into town where the chairs would be assembled. Turning legs and spindles for furniture required the same tools and skills needed for making the spokes of wood wheels for carts and carriages. With turned legs and spindles fixing the parts together was also relatively simple with the end tapered and then pushed tightly into a drilled hole and that avoided having to cut complicated mortice-and-tenon joints that needed careful work with a saw and a chisel … work that was best done on a proper bench where the wood could be held securely in place.

Through into the 19th century - and even into the early 20th century - local blacksmiths could make hinges and catches and nails if they were needed for the wood furniture.

Wealthier farmers in a village or rural clergymen who wanted more elaborate furniture for their posher homes or for the church bought more sophisticated and expensive furniture from nearby towns or even from abroad and then the features and styles of those imported pieces might be copied or, at least, roughly imitated by local craftsmen.

These relatively simple and 'honest' country chairs … honest meaning straightforward and unpretentious … were and still are appreciated even in the town or city. In part, that was because they were easier to make and cheaper for workers to buy but, in the late 19th and early 20th century, people were moving into Copenhagen to work in the port and work in new industries and may well have brought furniture from where they had lived, out in the countryside or smaller towns, or they deliberately sought out furniture that reminded them of distant family or distant lives. 

Unpretentious modesty and simple techniques, looked back to straightforward local carpentry, rather than to fancy foreign fashions, and that meant that people saw these well-made but basic and relatively light but strong chairs with turned legs and rush seats as appropriate for churches.

Good country furniture can be seen in appropriate room settings in the open air museums in Denmark and it is worth spending time looking at these pieces to see where modern designers have taken and adapted ideas but, even more interesting, to see types of furniture that are rarely made now such as the clothes press or plate rack or even the bed built into a cupboard or the large plank chests for storing bedding.

The influence of features that were taken from good country furniture can be seen in the sophisticated work of major designers of the modern period including the Nyborg Library Chairs by Hans Wegner, the 'People's Chair' by Børge Mogensen and, of course, in the Church Chair by Kaare Klint.

Church Chair by Kaare Klint

Chair for Nyborg Library by Hans Wegner

the Shaker rocking chair in the collection at Designmuseum Danmark

/

Designmuseum Danmark gives this rocking chair from the United States a prominent place in the introduction at the entrance to their gallery of modern Danish chairs and so, by implication, an important place in the story of Danish furniture in the 20th century. 

There are obvious links with the style and form of chairs designed by Ole Wanscher, Hans Wegner and Børge Mogensen and others in the 1940s and 1950s but I did not appreciate the complicated history of this chair or understand its direct influence until I read the account set out by Gorm Harkær in his monograph on Kaare Klint that was published in 2010.

In 1919 Kaare Klint took over teaching technical drawing for cabinetmakers at the Technical Society's school. His approach to furniture design was clearly set out in his programme where he states that the school "will not try to teach you to perform so-called beautiful specious Drawings where the whole room is reflected in the Furniture Polish: we will try to teach you to draw accurate and realistic line drawings. We will not try to teach you to draw Artworks in different Styles, but try to show you the beauty that lies in the perfect simple Design and Usability."

 
RP00074A.jpg

In the collection of Designmuseum Danmark but not currently on display… copy of a Shaker rocking chair made in beech by Rud. Rasmussen in 1942. The catalogue entry RP00074 gives the designer as Kaare Klint. Note the elongated vase-shaped turning at the top of the front legs above the seat that copies the form of the chair owned by Einar Utzon-Frank and drawn by O Brøndum Christensen in 1927 rather than the pronounced taper or thinning down of the upper part of the front leg on the Shaker chair purchased by the museum in 1935

In 1924 Klint was appointed an assistant professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, in a newly-established Department of Furniture Design, where, again, he emphasised the importance of measuring and drawing good examples of historic furniture and that took up much of the first year of his course. In 1927 Klint described these drawings as "the beginning of an archive of furniture studies." *

The Department of Furniture Design was then in the Danish Museum of Art & Design - now Designmuseum Danmark - and not in the main academy building in the palace of Charlottenborg. Students made carefully-measured drawings of a number of key pieces in the museum collection including a chair by the 18th-century English furniture maker Thomas Chippendale and these study drawings could then be used as a starting point for the design of a modern chair. 

The Danish sculptor Einar Utzon-Frank, who also taught at the Royal Academy, owned a rocking chair that was described as "in the American Colonial style" and that chair was surveyed in 1927 by O Brøndum Christensen. A precisely-measured drawing of a Shaker chair at a scale of 1:5 and photographs taken of the chair in 1928 survive. **

Then, in 1935, in an auction, the museum bought this Shaker Rocking chair, very close to the form of the chair owned by Utzon-Frank, and it was recorded in the acquisition index as A32/1935 where it is described as a shawl-back rocker with a cushion rail … that is the thin turned, slightly curved bar that runs across the back at the top of the back posts of the back rest of the chair.

In 1937 Edward and Faith Andrews published Shaker Furniture and, after a copy of that book was acquired by the museum library in 1941, it appears that Kaare Klint began a correspondence with American museums about Shaker furniture. ***

The following year, in 1942, Rud. Rasmussens Snedkerier - the cabinetmakers who worked closely with Kaare Klint and made much of the furniture that he designed - made a copy of the Utzon-Frank chair. They appear to have used the survey drawing by O Brøndum Christensen because the upper part of the front legs of the Rud. Rasmussen chair - with an elongated, turned, baluster shape above the seat rail - matches the Utzon-Frank chair rather than the chair owned by the museum that has long, elegant tapering or thinning down of the front leg between the seat rail and where it is housed into the underside of the arm rest.

Also in 1942, Kaare Klint produced designs for a number of chairs in a Shaker-style for FDB - the Danish Co-op - who had just set up a new office for furniture design. Two chairs - one with arms and one without arms and given the numbers J20 and J21 - were made as prototypes by Fritz Hansen Eftf although in the end they were not put into production.  ****

the chair designed for FDB - photographed in the exhibition on the work of Kaare Klint at Designmuseum Danmanrk

 

The original rocking chairs - the Utzon-Frank chair and the museum rocking chair - were made in workshops at one of the Shaker communities in America and, from their design, probably at Mount Lebanon where the settlement had been established in 1787 and continued right through until 1947. The religious movement of the Shakers had originated in England but many of the group emigrated to America from the north west - particularly from Lancashire - in search of a more tolerant place to practice their nonconformist beliefs. They took with them ideas and styles and local carpentry techniques which influenced the buildings they constructed and the furniture and panelling and fittings that they made in the settlements they established. Then, having built themselves farm houses, schools and chapels, and because the religious settlements were rural and generally self sufficient and relatively isolated - so by nature closed or inward looking - then these styles and designs became rather fixed. In fact, rocking chairs of this design appear in auction house catalogues where some are given a late date of manufacture - some examples dating from early in the 20th century.

So although Klint was not exactly admiring a contemporary chair nor was he inspired by a chair that was particularly old but nor, and perhaps more important, was it a Danish style or from a Danish tradition.

In part this should be seen as a a reaction to the poor quality of some industrial products of the period … a parallel reaction to what happened in England where architects and designers of the Arts and Crafts movement responded to what they saw as the poor design of furniture and factory-made household goods as industrial or factory production in England took over from craft and guild workshop production. In England they looked for inspiration to what they appreciated as a the better craftsmanship of traditional oak furniture of the 17th century and artisan furniture, such as Windsor chairs and cottage chairs, of the 18th century.

However, there were some significant differences between England and Denmark by the 1920s. Apart from expensive workshop furniture, made for companies like Liberties or Heal's, most traditional cabinetmakers' had long gone in England but in Copenhagen the workshops and the skills of cabinetmakers had survived - even if they felt threatened by factory production - and they were trying hard to adapt to a very different society and trying to make furniture for a different customer.

So for Kaare Klint it was more about the survival of cabinetmakers' skills rather than the revival of skills. The Shaker chair was, for him, one example of a design that he considered to be so good that it would be difficult or impossible to improve … the rocking chair was one of the few copies made by Rud. Rasmussen rather than a unique and specific design from Klint.

Klint seems to have admired the honesty and modesty of the Shaker chairs: they were straightforward … what decoration there was derived from the form and from the joinery and the techniques of the assembly … and those were the qualities that inspired the Church Chair by Klint from 1936, with Shaker-style ladder back and thin turned stretchers and the Shaker Chair also inspired designs for FDB. 

Perhaps the only thing that is surprising is that although Klint designed some of the most rational storage furniture from this period - with large pieces of furniture with cupboards and a series of drawers - he was not, it would seem, inspired by the fitted cupboards and chests of drawers that are some of the best proportioned and most beautiful pieces that were produced by the Shakers.

 

notes:

 *  Gorm Harkær, Kaare Klint, in two volumes by Klintiana (2010) page 635
** drawing RR model no. 6356 reproduced by Gorm Harkær on page 637 and the photographs page 637
*** page 367
**** Gorm Harkær reproduces the drawings and photographs of the two prototypes on pages 640 and 641

 Architects and furniture designers of the English Arts and Crafts Movement reacted to what was seen by some as the poor quality of design that was on display in the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and, generally, the poor design of factory-goods in the second half of the 19th century. A leading proponent for a return to the quality of hand-made furniture and household goods and textiles was William Morris. The Art Workers' Guild was founded in 1884 and the architect and designer C R Ashbee founded the Guild and School of Handicraft that started in London in 1888 but moved to Chipping Camden in 1902.

There were comparable Arts and Crafts movements in the Netherlands and Germany and Austria but all, inevitably, produced expensive furniture for a wealthy middle class ….. closer in character to the style of furniture in Denmark by Gottlieb Bindesbøll and his contemporaries rather than the work of Danish designers in the 20th century.

 

the everyday chair

/

These chairs were designed about 1930 by the Copenhagen City Architect's Office for use in school offices.

They are not precisely what would have been found in a kitchen in Vesterbro or at a table in an apartment in Islands Brygge - they had to be more robust so were more expensive that chairs for the home - but they are pine and they are painted and the designs are straightforward with a simple arrangement of stretchers to strengthen the framework of the legs and they have simple plain wood back rests that are either fixed across or fixed between the uprights of the back.

Dining table and chairs in birch designed by Viggo Sten Møller and made by Adolf Jørgensen for the Cabinetmakers' Exhibition in 1929. Note, the setting had a P.H. lamp over the table.

 

 
 

Through the late Autumn of 2017, posts here focused on a number of chairs from the 20th century that are design classics and all, in different ways, examples of new styles or examples of experiments with new forms and new manufacturing techniques. However, the problem is, this gives an impression that every Danish chair represents a point in time on a rapid, inevitable and ongoing progression of design innovations.

But if you look at photographs of homes from the 20th century or even photographs from the annual exhibition of the Cabinetmakers' Guild Furniture exhibitions that were held from 1927 through to 1966 - where craftsmen were actually competing to produce the latest and the best - you see a good number of distinctly old-fashioned chairs and much of the best modern furniture was produced in small quantities or even, in some cases, made only when commissioned. Many of the designs would have been considered expensive, even at the time, and well beyond the budget of an ordinary working family.

Of course, for offices and schools and for factories and work places - let alone for ordinary families in ordinary homes in new apartments in the city in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s - Danish manufacturers actually had to produce ordinary chairs or, at least, chairs that were designed and made to be robust and affordable rather than being primarily award winning, memorable or collectable.

So part of the story of the development of modern design in Denmark is the story of designers trying to produce ordinary chairs that were reasonably priced but well designed and well made.

One reason - perhaps the main reason - for the annual exhibition of the work of cabinetmakers was so that these craftsmen could show they could compete with the emerging furniture factories, so proposals from cabinetmakers were  "submitted for both cheap and somewhat more expensive furniture" for the exhibition. 

For the Cabinetmakers' Exhibition in 1929 Viggo Sten Møller and Hans Hansen designed furniture for a two-room apartment with a compact dining table and chairs made by Adolf Jørgensen.

In 1932 Møller became the editor of the trade journal Nyt Tidsskrift for Kunstindustri and alongside technical articles he introduced pieces on colour schemes, lighting and textiles and from the architect Marinus Andersen he commissioned an article about furnishing a small apartment for a couple about to get married.

The cabinetmakers began to introduce a broader range of furniture so pieces specifically for children or in 1939 there were designs for a study for a student by Børge Mogensen and Aage Windeleff. In the exhibition in 1962 there was even a large kitchen designed by Henning Jensen and Hanne and Torben Valeur that was made by the cabinetmakers Christensen & Larsen although it was clear that this would have been an exceptional and expensive project … so hardly a flat-pack job.

Around 1930, Magnus L Stephensen was asked to furnish two test apartments for a public housing scheme at Ryparken - apartment buildings designed by Povl Baumann - that was based on a budget that was realistic for a young working family but he found only one factory and one traditional workshop in the city who could provide furniture he considered good enough within that budget.

Dan-stol from 1930 designed by Søren Hansen the grandson of the founder of Fritz Hansen

Bentwood chair model 234 (above) from Fritz Hansen by Magnus Stephensen (1903-1984)

 

Magnus Stephensen produced designs for the furniture makers Fritz Hansen.

The Café Chair in bent wood from the Viennese manufacturer Thonet - designed in the middle of the 19th century - is acknowledged by many historians to be the first factory-made chair and it was certainly a very popular everyday chair that was exported widely and in large numbers … my grandparents in England bought a Thonet chair, the version with arms, in the 1930s.

Steam bending wood and the use of plywood, was not common in Denmark until the 1920s when the manufacturer Fritz Hansen realised the potential of both and Søren Hansen, grandson of the founder of the company, designed what was called a Dan-stole for the company in 1930 - a rationalisation and simplification of the Thonet Café Chair - and Magnus Stephensen designed chair Model 234 that combined a bent-wood frame with a more comfortable shaped and curved back rest in thin wood. DAN was a general term used for these chairs in steam-bent beech.

Co-op Denmark started to design high-quality but inexpensive furniture in 1940 with the architect and planner Steen Eiler Rasmussen providing advice as a consultant. He had curated an exhibition of applied art in 1932 to look at well-designed everyday objects.

 

Chairs and a dining table designed by Børge Mogensen and made by the cabinetmaker Erhard Rasmussen in pear wood for the Cabinetmakers' Exhibition in 1944. Very simple square frame with upholstered pad for a seat and simple curve of thin wood for back support presumably screwed to back uprights with plugs over the fixing in contrasting wood. But note that the back supports are curved in section so not actually that basic and because the legs are relatively thin in section then there are stretchers to strengthen the frame but, rather unusual, to front and back but not to the sides between the front and back legs.

 

Børge Mogensen was appointed to be head of the design department at FDB Møbler (Fællesforeningen for Danmarks Brugsforeninger or Commonwealth of Danish Confederations of Users …  part of the Danish COOP) and in 1944 the designs were shown to the public when he furnished a test apartment in the Coop store on Frederiksborggade in Copenhagen. 

In the sitting room there was a pine table, an Ercol-style chair and a version of an English Windsor chair at a desk that was a wall-hung unit with a front flap that dropped down as a surface for writing at and on the floor the room had simple rush matting. 

Rasmussen published an article in the magazine Andelsbladet to set out the work of his better furniture campaign and he explained that the apartment in the store had "realistic rooms and floors, walls, ceilings, doors and windows - all with the dimensions that are found in ordinary little homes." … and went on to describe it as a 'housing laboratory.'

"The new furniture is so ordinary and direct that one would almost believe it had made itself. But this is a virtue. It is not seductive and overwhelming like the pieces we see in advertisements, but then there is also hope that people will not grow tired of them in the long run."

Several well-known and established designers in that classic period through the 1950s and 1960s produced chairs that were priced for an ordinary buyer … so Hans Wegner, Poul Volther, Mogens Koch, Jørgen Bækmark and Børge Mogensen all designed chairs for FDB Møbler. 

 

J39 / Folkestolen / People's Chair designed in 1947 for FDB by Børge Mogensen

 

Now all major design and furniture companies have a range of basic or straightforward and well-made chairs but the launch of a new chair can still be a major event.

Some companies produce classics designed in the 1950s and 1960s where the price can be kept as low as possible by the rationalisation of manufacturing methods or simply by the scale of production and make it possible now to have a choice from dozens and dozens of different well-designed chairs that are well made and reasonably priced.

J48 designed by Poul Volther for FDB Møbler and still made for the Danish Coop. This is a good everyday chair but is also a sort of cross-over design inspired by simple country furniture but given a real sense of modern style with a choice of strong colours

chair made in Copenhagen by Søren Ulrich …the style is reminiscent of chairs from the 1930s and 1940s and a good choice for a kitchen table or small dining room and appropriate for one of the apartments in the city dating from the early 20th century

 

the Red Chair type

/
 

Chippendale stole / Chippendale chairs

L1170870.jpg

If asked to name an important early modern Danish chair, many people would probably suggest Chair 7 by Arne Jacobsen or possibly a chair by Poul Kjærholm. My guess would be that very few people would suggest the Red Chair designed by Kaare Klint in the 1920s as the first truly modern Danish chair but surely that could be a valid claim? 

Now, fast approaching the 2020s, the Red Chair from the 1920s seems old-fashioned and possibly slightly boring or staid for current taste but through the 1930s and 1940s it was a common and popular type of chair.

It was the first chair where we can see that 'modern' ideas of simplicity and structural clarity were essential to the design … Kaare Klint analysed what he considered to be the core requirements for a chair - worked out how that chair could be made and tried to express that rational approach in how the chair looked and, in that process, he stripped away any unnecessary decoration. Essentially here is the idea of form following function and material.

Part of the problem for us now is that then he took an 18th-century English design as his starting point and in part it is difficult to appreciate chairs of this type because, for modern tastes, they appear to be worthy but rather boring … possibly more suited now and possibly even then to an office or institution than to a home.

In fact the chair was designed for the design museum in 1927 and then in 1930 Klint produced a version of the chair with upholstered arms for the office of the Prime Minister Thorvald Stauning with a set of four smaller chairs for the staff of the Prime Minister and a set of 12 chairs for his conference room.

The same cabinet maker who made the chairs for the Prime Minister - Rud. Rasmussen - made a version of the Red Chair for the Thorvaldsen Museum that was lighter, with cane seat and back, and for an office on Nørre Voldgade, designed by Povl Baumann, Kaare Klint designed a chair that was a variation on the Red Chair with a front to the seat that is bowed out rather than straight when seen from above … a style of chair that went with the slightly severe classic revival taste of some architecture of the period.

So the Red Chair type was well designed, well made and sensible and strong - essentially, a serious chair. Solicitors and bank managers in England in the 1950s and 1960s sat on chairs like this. After graduating - working first for the University of London and then for the Civil Service - I sat at a desk on chairs that were a variation of this … chairs with straight wood legs, side and cross stretchers, upholstered leather seat, wooden arms, one with a padded leather back rest and the other with a series of thin wood slats across the back. So it was a good chair for offices and public buildings.

the chair designed by Klint for the office of Prime Minister Thorvald Stauning

 

But it was also obvious that this style of chair, even if it was a little formal, had a place in a home.

In the first exhibition of the Cabinetmakers in 1927 there was a room setting with furniture by the cabinetmaker Anny Berntsen & Co. The dining chairs were relatively simple but well-proportioned and well-made in oak with upholstered square seats that tapered towards a narrower back and the back legs were curved out backwards and tapered so smaller in cross section at the floor than where the rails of the seat are joined. The back legs continued up to support a large square back rest with a gap between the seat and the back, where the frame is exposed, and the back was slightly wider than the uprights and rounded at the top corners so, again, a variation on the Red Chair. 

The dining table shown with those chairs was square and compact but appears to have had leaves so it could be extended and it looks as if the furniture, even at this early stage, was designed for a relatively small apartment.

A similar and rather restrained design of chair in elm was shown by Henrik Wörts in 1928.

At the Cabinetmakers' Exhibition in 1929 there was another square table with straight, vertical legs - so un-tapered - and chairs in birch designed by Viggo Sten Møller and made by Jens Peter Jensen.  The chairs have straight legs but with stretchers only at each side - so not across the back or across the centre under the seat - and the back legs above the seat were tapered and angled back at the top to support a narrower back rest - so not as deep top to bottom as on the Red Chair.

These were shown in the room setting with a dining alcove and alongside a double wardrobe, and with a neat low book case on legs with shelves and a day bed with deep drawers underneath - so again the implication is that this furniture was designed for a small apartment. A drawing of the wardrobe shows hanging space on one side, with a hat shelf at the top, and the other half is divided by shelves but the drawing shows tableware and household linen on the shelves which suggest it might even have been for a single room apartment.* It would seem that Møller was suggesting that this good, well-made furniture , with a variation of the Red Chair, was appropriate for even the smallest modern home.

this chair by Kaare Klint and made by Rud. Rasmussen was shown at the 1930 Cabinetmakers' Exhibition with a dining table designed by Rigmor Andersen

Another version of the Red Chair was shown at the Cabinetmakers' Exhibition in 1930 along with a low cabinet on a stand with sliding doors with a series of deep shelves designed to take table settings of china and glassware.

And, in the exhibition in 1932, almost the same shape of chair by Jacob Kjær in Cuban mahogany was shown but possibly because the wood was exotic and expensive the upholstered back rest was replaced by a cross rail just above the seat and a straight top rail with four simple vertical rails grouped in the centre but this is basically the same shape and form and style of chair.

 

dining table and chairs designed by O Mølgaard-Nielsen and made by the cabinetmaker Jacob Kjær - shown at the Cabinetmakers' Exhibition in 1933

A version of the Red Chair was shown in 1933 with a set of furniture designed by Orla Mølgaard-Nielsen and was described as appropriate for a three-room bungalow and a reviewer comments that the design owes much to Klint. What is interesting is that in that review of the furniture it was described as compact but the cupboard was designed to store china, glass and table linen with four sections with doors, two above two, but inside shallow trays on runners held table settings for twelve people. It implies that although the furniture was designed for a relatively modest home, the owners would probably want to be able to feed twelve people with a full set of matching china and tableware that was otherwise stored away in a well-designed piece of furniture.

All this shows that architects and the cabinet makers certainly did not see the Red Chair type as primarily an office or museum chair and by the 1940s the chair was being made in more exotic wood for middle-class buyers and was being made to look lighter and more modern.

furniture for a two-room apartment designed by Børge Mogensen - made by Erhard Rasmussen and shown at the Cabinetmakers' Exhibition in 1941

 

Given the outbreak of war in Europe, a surprisingly large number of exhibitors showed their furniture at the Cabinetmakers' Exhibition in 1941.

Børge Morgensen showed furniture in cherry wood that was made by the cabinetmaker Erbard Rasmussen for a two-room apartment but a review by a journalist from Berlingske was not particularly kind:

“The furniture for the two-room flat with a kitchen-dining room, seems to have been made for dolls, a little too fragile for full-grown adults, but the style is very nice, clean and sober. It is reasonable to assume that the personal touch will be added by the young people themselves.” 

The bedroom furniture for the exhibition apartment was by Kay Gottlob.

A chair by Henrik Wörts with cane back was shown at the Cabinetmakers' Exhibition in 1943 and the Red Chair type appears at the Cabinetmakers' Exhibition through into the 1960s … in 1961 a chair by Gunnar Magnussen and made by Søren Horn was shown which had a cane seat and back and side stretchers and a central cross rail below the seat but by then the next generation of architects and designers were prominent and the Red Chair style became less and less  popular.

note:

* IIn Copenhagen the normal way to describe an apartment is without including the kitchen or the bathroom in the number of rooms … so a one-room apartment in the 1920s had a kitchen plus one room that combined living room and bedroom and there might have been a toilet or separate bathroom although in smaller and older apartments the toilet might have been out on a landing or outside and shared and to have a bath, rather than a wash at a sink, might have meant going to a communal bath house. A two room apartment would have had a living room and a separate bedroom plus a kitchen and probably a bathroom.

chair in Cuban mahogany designed by Erik Wörts. Made by the cabinetmaker Henrik Wörts,
Shown in the Cabinetmakers' Exhibition of 1943

 

side by side

/

Hans Wegner and Finn Juhl were almost the same age and The Chair, designed by Wegner, and chair NV44, by Juhl, were designed and made a few years apart, in the late 1940s. 

Both chairs are in wood, with a back rest in wood that is shaped and twisted to continue round into wood arm rests and both chairs are of a high quality - both made by skilled cabinet makers - so, ostensibly, the chairs are of the same type.* 

But clearly they are distinctly different - even if It is difficult to pin down and describe those differences - because once you have seen the chairs it would be difficult to mistake one for the other. 

If you showed both chairs to someone who knows nothing about Danish design history and asked them to give a date to the chairs, my guess would be that some people, but relatively few, would suggest the 1940s. Many would see the chair by Juhl as more traditional or more old fashioned and might push its date back - back in the century or even wonder if it was older - whereas many would be surprised that the chair by Wegner is now nearly 70 years old and might hazard a guess for its date as being in the 1960s or possibly even more recent.

 

The Chair by Hans Wegner 1949

NV44 by Finn Juhl 1944

The Chair

Hans Wegner (1914-2007)

cabinetmakers Johannes Hansen, PP Møbler
height: 76cm
width: 63cm
depth: 52 cm
height of seat: 44cm
now made in oak, ash, cherry or walnut
leather or cane

NV44

Finn Juhl (1912-1989)

cabinetmaker Niels Vodder
height: 73cm
width: 60cm
depth: 52 cm
height of seat: 47
Cuban mahogany rosewood
leather
initially only 12 examples produced

 

The NV44 by Finn Juhl is more sculptural, more dramatic - with a stronger sense of movement - so the back rail or back rest is shaped and twisted but there is a sense that the wood is still under tension and the arms are pulled outwards and the uprights are twisted out to support the arms to form a cup shape almost wrapping around the person sitting in the chair. 

There are stretchers but not between the back and front legs - as in a conventional design - but they run from the back legs and are tilted down and inwards to the centre of a deep stretcher between the front legs and that stretcher itself is curved but, surely, curved the wrong way because an arch supports and spreads weight, taking the load down and out to the ground, but a reverse arch, as here, creates the impression that the uprights are or could move together at the top. It creates a dynamic where the front of the seat itself seems almost as if it is slung between the front legs.

Obviously the arms and back rest on Wegner's design have also been cut to shape and twisted but, despite that manipulation, they seem natural and at rest. The legs of the chair are reduced down, as much as possible, by being tapered - that's why the Wegner chair is elegant - but the seat and the centre part of the leg, where the rails of the seat are joined, are strong enough and those joins, fixing the seat rail into the legs, are precisely cut and strong enough that stretchers were omitted completely.

The seat on Wegner's chair is slightly hollowed, to make it look and be more comfortable and it is wide and open - uncluttered - so it looks as if there is room to move around, however large you are, and the outward splay of the legs so wider apart at the floor than at the seat makes the chair, despite those elegant tapered legs, look stable, with the chair standing firm, calm and somehow self contained.

So is the chair by Juhl tense? If you prefer the chair designed by Finn Juhl then you might argue that the NV44 is more organic, voluptuous or sensual, and the lines and silhouette of the chair by Wegner not more pure but more mechanical.

 

Certainly the chairs could not have been more different commercially.

Finn Juhl was not concerned with commercial success or, actually, any compromise and here one suspects that Niels Vodder, the cabinetmakers, had to work hard to realise the design. It was presumably the complexity and the cost of the work that explains why, initially, only 12 chairs were produced.

In contrast, it's known that Hans Wegner collaborated closely with the cabinetmakers who used their skill and their experience, as he himself said, "cutting the elements down to the bare essentials" so together, they produced a chair that is not just rational but, from that process of simplification, it meant that, if not exactly made on a factory production line, the chair could be produced in relatively large numbers.  

The NV44 by Juhl has much more conventional upholstery with the leather taken over the frame of the seat and that meant it needed a good upholsterer with real skill - look at the piping on the edge of the leather where it is taken around the uprights supporting the back and arms - and the work could only be done on the fully finished chair. 

With the leather version of The Chair by Wegner, the leather seat and upholstery were separate and dropped into place when the chair was assembled so seat and frame could be made independently.

The design of the frame of the seat on The Chair also meant that it could be in cane … in fact the first chairs were all with cane seats and the leather covered version was introduced a year later.

That, in part, explains the success of The Chair which is still in production, made now by PP Møbler. 

And it is not just the choice of seat because The Chair was one of the first chairs where the same design could be customised to take on a different character if the customer chose a different type of wood or different finishes for the wood … the chair can take on a different character for a different setting. Not just a very beautiful chair but a bit of a chameleon.

 

note: *

ostensibly similar but in their classification of chair types at Designmuseum Danmark, the chair by Finn Juhl is described as a Chinese Chair and Wegner's chair as a Round Arm or Klismos Chair.

 
 

PP Møbler

/

detail of pp112 designed by Hans Wegner in 1978

 

 

In 1953 PP Møbler was founded by the brothers Lars Peder and Ejnar Pedersen in Allerød - a small town north Copenhagen. They started as traditional cabinetmakers …  the first chair made in the workshops was the Pot Chair - designed by Nanna and Jørgen Ditzel - that was produced by the upholstery company AP  Stolen but with PP Møbler subcontracted to make the frame.

Then they produced the frame for another important upholstered chair from AP Stolen - the Papa Bear Chair designed by Hans Wegner. He was impressed by the quality of the work - even though it was to be hidden by upholstery - and that was the beginning of one of the most important partnerships in the history of modern Danish furniture.

The collaboration with Wegner was close … he challenged the cabinetmakers to think in new ways and they responded by not only developing new methods and techniques for bending and joining wood to realise the designs but they were also prepared to challenge and criticise and contribute suggestions in the development of any new chairs. 

In 1969 Wegner designed pp201 - his first chair that was specifically and exclusively for the company - and he encouraged PP Møbler to become an independent brand with their own products and their own sales department to sell furniture under their own name. He even designed a new company logo.

Circle Chair designed by Hand Wegner and produced by PP Møbler since 1986

 

PP Møbler now also have a licence to produce earlier designs by Hans Wegner - with rights to make pieces originally produced by the cabinetmakers Johannes Hansen after they closed in 1990 - so they make some of the best-known chairs designed by Wegner including the Round Chair, the Minimal Chair, the Peacock Chair, Valet Chair and Tub Chair.

Ejnar Pedersen was certain that craftsmen had to have pride in their work in order to maintain standards so the company have remained traditional cabinetmakers. They have a huge respect for wood, retaining traditional methods of cutting and finishing but they are also aware of the need to develop and move forward so they make it clear that technology is not a substitute but should enhance “the craftsman's field of skills.”

They have developed computer-controlled milling machine for precision cutting and shaping - seen clearly on the Cow Horn Chair from 1952, with the two parts of the back joined by a comb in contrasting wood, and for the cutting and shaping and joins for the back of The Round Chair which are seen from every angle so even slight imperfections would be obvious.

Tub Chair pp530 designed by Hans Wegner in 1954

 

They produce a number of very complicated and demanding designs that tests the skills of the cabinetmakers ….  the Chinese Chair by Wegner pp66 from 1943 - where the back is formed from a length of wood that has been compressed and then bent in three dimensions - the Tub Chair that has a double bent shell - one bent - one bent and twisted - the Peacock Chair designed from 1947 and the Flag Halyard Chair with a metal frame strung with rope that Wegner designed in 1950. 

PP Møbler have produced a prestigious group of experimental designs that pushed conventions including the bentwood chair by Poul Kjærholm from 1978.

Several chairs remained as prototypes for many years until the machines and techniques were developed including the machine that was necessary to make the hoop of wood for the Circle Halyard Chair designed in the 1960s but finally realised in 1986  and the Chinese Bench pp266 that was finally put into production in 1991 with the development of advanced pre-compressed and bending techniques.

PP Møbler

guide to the furniture from PP Møbler

/
 

This guide to the cabinetwork of PP Møbler was produced in 2016 and I was given a copy when I met their sales team at 3Daysof Design so I assume that it has been used mainly to promote the work of the company at trade fairs but it is actually a well-written, general introduction to some of the best furniture made by cabinetmakers in Denmark.

It sets out a brief history of the company and discusses their work with designers including Nanna Ditzel, Poul Kjærholm, Finn Juhl and Verner Panton but focuses on their important collaboration with Hans Wegner. 

In a clear and straightforward way, it covers how timber for high-quality furniture is cut and prepared and how both traditional and new techniques are used together in the workshops to make the production of these major pieces possible and how new technology has been used to drive forward new designs and new approaches. 

There is a useful introduction to the main species of timber they work with - oak, ash, maple and cherry - including a brief descriptions of grain and appearance and notes about how and why the different woods are used in the production of their furniture. The company has its own woodland and in this book they make some important points about the management of trees and about sustainability. When areas of woodland are felled and then replanted, a number of trees are left to protect new saplings. Those older and larger 'shelter tree' in a woodland have a longer growth period and when they, in turn, are felled, they are the source for much thicker planks - up to 5" thick - that are used for larger or more complex and important parts of chairs like the shaped backs. Pieces are cut to shape immediately the timber is delivered to the workshop but are then left for up to two years to condition. Complicated back and arm rests, that have to be made from several pieces that are joined, are cut from the same length of timber - as mirror shapes - so that colour and grain match across the back and for tables the leaves, for an individual table, are cut from the same tree for the same reason.

In the book there is a section or catalogue where each of the chairs has a short history of the design with an explanation of technical details that are specific or important to that piece. There are line drawings for each of their  chairs; easy chairs; chaise long; benches and a stool and tables or desks and there are even useful plans to show the arrangement of chairs around each of the tables with and without additional leaves.

Although relatively short, the book even covers maintenance of the furniture - explaining why certain finishes are applied with advice about how the wood can be cleaned and explains why a patina, developed over the years, is important as it makes each piece personal to the owner.

It is crucial that companies produce this sort of publication to engage customers but also, as schools cut back on teaching arts and crafts and as fewer people have the time or space to do woodwork themselves, it can't be assumed now that a potential buyer will know enough about wood and the techniques used in making furniture to understand why something was made in a certain way; see how a design reflects and respects the different characteristics of the trees used or understand why that has to be reflected in the price tag. Few buyers have the time or the inclination to become experts on cabinetmaking before they buy a chair but actually the more information they have then the more discerning they can be.

Books like this are also a way to give customers important information about sustainability. It may have been said by someone else somewhere else but there is a brilliant line in this book that I have not come across before … that a piece of furniture “should endure the time it takes for a new tree to grow.”

Much of this material and a good collection of photographs can also be found on the PP Møbler web site … including historic images of the workshops, images of their modern workshop equipment, with press photographs of the furniture produced and an explanation of techniques such as compression bending and the computer-programmed milling and cutting developed by the company.

PP Møbler

 
 
 

plywood for furniture in the 1940s

/
 

There is an interesting group of chairs in the gallery at Designmuseum Danmark - most dating from the 1940s - that show how Danish designers and furniture makers first experimented with using plywood. 

Through the 1930s there was pressure on Danish furniture manufacturers to produce cheaper furniture, in part by moving production from the small workshops of the cabinet makers to factories and in part by exploiting new materials and by developing new production techniques for making more furniture in larger production runs.

Plywood could be produced with timber from relatively thin and relatively quick-growing trees and the sheets were light and easy to cut to shape; could be bent to a curve and, when pinned or glued over a wooden frame, plywood could be used for facing large cupboards or simply for the bottoms of drawers. 

A patent was taken out in the 1790s for making a thin boards of wood from layers of veneer that were stuck together with glue but the veneer was cut by hand and relatively rough although strong. In making plywood, then as now, alternate sheets of veneer are turned through ninety degrees so that the natural grain runs first along and then across, so the final board has considerably more strength than a comparable thickness cut from a single piece of timber.

Plywood was not produced on an industrial scale until the 1860s and the word plywood is recorded first in print in the United States in 1917. 

Thonet in Vienna in the second half of the 19th century made light-weight chairs with steam-bent frames that had seats with either woven cane or just a simple round piece of plywood that dropped into a rebate in the frame that formed the seat. Front legs and back posts were bolted to the seat frame and a second steam-bent hoop of wood was fixed just below the seat, instead of stretchers, to hold the legs vertical and again this was bolted or screwed in place. By using screws or bolts - rather than traditional mortice-and-tenon joins as a cabinetmaker would - the chairs could be shipped as separate parts and then assembled on delivery by someone with just basic skills.

By the late 1930s and through the war - through the 1940s - good timber for making furniture was expensive and not readily available so plywood was used, with a light frame, particularly for wardrobes or cupboards. In England this was often referred to as utility furniture.

From the 1920s furniture makers began to cut and bend plywood into more complicated and curved shapes. It was used in the construction of aeroplanes and - before glass fibre and plastics were developed -  for the bodywork of cars and marine plywood, using water resistant glue to bond the layers, was used to build boats.* If the glued layers are held under pressure in a shaped former as they dry, then the piece retains that curve or shape after it is removed from the former.

In Finland, Alvar Alto designed furniture in the late 1920s and early 1930s where a plywood seat and back in a single piece was bent into an elaborate and sinuous curve and in the United States, in the early 1940s, Charles and Ray Eames designed the first chairs where plywood was curved in two planes to form a complex shell.

 

note:

 * I was taught to sail in a small dinghy - a Mirror - made in the school workshops from a kit with parts in marine plywood stitched together with wire and with the joins covered with tape. They were designed in 1962 with Barry Bucknell - a TV DIY expert. Over 70,000 were made and many raced. Bucknell lived in St Mawes - a beautiful fishing village in Cornwall - with his house looking over the beach so I guess that was where the link between sailing and TV DIY could be found. I'm not sure that design is exactly the right word as out on open water it felt a bit like being in a floating wardrobe. The dingy took its name from the British daily newspaper although I can't remember why … presumably they published the patterns and working drawings. The only excuse for including a footnote on Bucknell in a blog about Scandinavian design is that in his TV series he showed people how to do things like disguise an old door that had sunk panels by covering it with sheets of plywood - or worse with hardboard - to create a clean Scandinavian look …… on the cheap. At it's peak, his weekly TV show had 7 million regular viewers so the sort of numbers that style bloggers now dream about.

 

shell chairs in laminated wood by Arne Jacobsen

/

Ant Chair 1952,  The Tongue 1955,  chair model 3105 for Munkegård Elementary School 1955

Series 7 1955,  Side Chair 3103 from 1955,  Grand Prix 1957 ... all in the permanent collection of Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen

 

 

Looking posts on this site from 2017 about Danish chairs from the 20th century a major and obvious omission from the list are the shell chairs in laminated wood that were designed by Arne Jacobsen in the 1950s.

It was an amazing and productive decade for the architect when he was working on major buildings but still designing housing. Work on Munkegård Elementary School in Copenhagen started in 1951 and was completed in 1956;  the Town Hall in Rødovre was completed in 1956 and the Town Hall in Glostrup was completed in 1959. Jacobsen designed major commercial and industrial buildings in this period - including an office building for A Jespersen & Son in the centre of Copenhagen - where work started in 1952 and finished in 1955 - the Christensen factory in Aalborg and pharmaceutical factories for Novo Industri A/S in Copenhagen and for a new site at Bagsværd to the north of the city centre and from 1955 through to 1960, Jacobsen was working on the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen.

He designed several major housing schemes in that same period with both the Alléhusene housing complex and the  Jespersen row houses built in the area close to the railway station at Jægersborg - a growing suburb in the north part of Copenhagen where Jacobsen had designed housing in the 1940s - and there was a second phase of building on the coast  at Klampenborg - with the Søholm houses built just south of the Bellevue theatre and the Bellavista apartments that Jacobsen had designed in the 1930s.

For prestigious public buildings Jacobsen designed specific, custom-made, furniture but he also worked on more commercial designs with a growing demand for modern, well-designed furniture for the home. Jacobsen designed a series of shell chairs in laminated wood in collaboration with Fritz Hansen - the well-established Danish furniture manufacturer - that could be used in commercial and public buildings but were also increasingly popular for use in ordinary homes.

These chairs included model FH3100 known as the Ant Chair that was designed in 1952; model FH3102 or The Tongue - a small chair for children designed originally for Munkegård School in Copenhagen but later made in a larger version; from 1955 model FH3105 - another chair produced for Munkegård - and from that same year model FH3103 with a more pronounced curve between the seat and the back with a broader and deeper and squarer upper part to provide better support for the lower back and the shoulder blades.

The Series 7 - model FH3107 - the most famous of these laminated chairs - also dates from 1955 and is still the best-selling chair produced by Fritz Hansen.

Then, last in this series of shell chairs, the Grand Prix - model FH4130 - designed in 1957 and made in several versions.

The form of these chairs - with a moulded shell in laminated wood - divides them - visually and, in terms of construction and manufacture, into two distinct parts with a seat and back to the chair in one material - the shell in laminated and moulded wood - and a base or support that was made separately in another material.

This clear division of the production process could be exploited because it allowed the manufacturer to make different versions of a chair by providing options for distinctly different bases that changed not just the character of the chair but often also the way that the chair was used and where it was used …

  • most of the chairs could be purchased with thin metal legs that were bent under the shell and held in place on a fixing plate. These legs were compact and light in weight so the chairs could be used in a house or in a small apartment as a dining chair or a general chair
  • for several of the designs, there was an option for a support of legs in bentwood if a customer preffered a chair that looked more traditional
  • nearly all the chairs could be stacked and, although they were light, they were surprisingly robust, and came to be used in offices and canteens and meeting rooms
  • for several of the shaped and moulded chairs, there were options for a single vertical metal column that could be fixed in tiered rows for seating in a lecture theatre
  • most of the chairs had an option for a cross-shaped metal base, usually light-weight aluminium, that could be fitted with a swivel mechanism and/or castors for use at a desk so they could be used as an office chair
  • and - most unlikely of all - the simple and compact shell of the Tongue chair, designed initially as a chair for a child, was upholstered in leather and set on a high fixed metal column with a swivel mechanism for a bar stool at the SAS Royal Hotel.

These chairs are deceptively simple but, in production, the moulding process presented challenges.

The chairs that were designed by Alvar Alto and manufactured in Finland from the 1930s were the first Nordic designs to exploit the properties of laminated and moulded wood in the commercial production of furniture. The layers of wood veneer were curved into different forms under pressure so the shape was 'remembered' when the wood was taken from the press but although those chairs by Alto had the seat and back from a single piece of laminated wood, the curve was in one plane so that it formed, in effect, a scroll.

Trying to mould the laminated wood into more complex curves, either hollow or convex and in both directions across the shell, Fritz Hansen put the material under considerably more stress.

The challenges might seem to be relatively simple …

  • to use the thinnest possible gauge of plywood to stop the piece from looking crude or being heavy
  • to source high quality, unblemished and even or consistent veneer … plywood for construction can have patches or uneven colour but for these chairs the shell was just sanded and finished to maintain the natural qualities of the timber so a good or an interesting grain pattern can also be important
  • to bend as sharp a curve as possible between the seat and the back without the facing layers of the finished shell delaminating - so folding on the inner face of a curve or splitting on the outer face
  • to create complex curves that were hollow or concave front to back - so it was not like sitting on a plank - but also curved across the width, so from side to side which, in effect, anticipates the curve under the weight of a person sitting down - to avoid that feeling of it sinking in like sitting down on, or rather, in a canvas chair
  • to create those complex curves without cutting into and overlapping sections of the shell
  • to develop ways of fixing the thin shell to any form of leg or support … you cannot fix a leg unit with screws through the leg and straight into the shell from below, because the shell is too thin, but if you fix screws or bolts from above, driven down into the leg or base, then those are exposed and you would be sitting on the screw or bolt heads

On that last point, the first version of the Grand Prix had four L-shaped and moulded leg pieces stuck to the underside of the shell with a glue developed for that purpose but, I presume, under stress, the glue delaminated the facing layer of the shell so in later versions the design was changed to a cross-shaped and self-supporting framework of legs that was fixed to a plywood plate at the centre of the underside of the seat in a similar way to the fixing of the metal legs.

For comfort, there must have been extensive trials to adjust the flexibility of the shell and the strength, weight and flexibility of the legs or base - particular where the chair has legs in thin bent tube metal. Too flexible and the chair would feel unstable but too rigid and it would be like plonking down on a park bench. The chairs also use rubber spacers or buffers set further out from the centre fixing plate to hold the legs free of the shell; provide some control to the flexibility of the shell and also stop the legs torqueing or twisting or shifting round.

L1170907.jpg

The view of the underside of a Series 7 Chair shows just how complex and how subtle the design of the shaping of the metal legs is with the cross pieces of the legs under the seat protruding beyond the edge of the seat - so that the chairs could be stacked - and with the metal curved downwards towards the centre to follow the shape of the moulded seat rather than sitting against it. The legs are also angled outwards - rather than being set vertical - which in part makes the chair appear lighter and more elegant - strictly vertical legs can look basic or stolid - but also provides extra stability for a light chair.

There is an interesting but more general point about the shell chairs designed by Jacobsen and made by Fritz Hansen. We are now so familiar with major Scandinavian design companies like Muuto or Normann producing chairs with a range of bases and a range of colours and covers along with options for plain shells or upholstered versions, that we no longer see that as unusual - or, actually, we take that for granted because we expect a number of options when choosing a design. Before these chairs were produced by Fritz Hansen in the 1950s, chairs were designed as a complete or self-contained entity with production in relatively small numbers but, if there were options or variations, it might be that a different material could be used for the frame - so asking for a chair to be made in mahogany rather than oak for instance - or would be limited to selecting leather rather than textile for an upholstered chair.

At most, the scale of a chair might be adapted for a later version so Rud Rasmussen produced the Red Chair designed by Kaare Klint in a smaller size as a dining chair where the original, was wider with more generous proportions, designed for the meeting room at the Design Museum. Chairs like the Thonet Chair from Austria, produced through the second half of the 19th century, was made in large numbers and was made to be transported in parts and assembled on delivery but that was unusual and there were different models or different styles but no options within each type of chair. Several of the chairs designed  at the Bauhaus were conceived as relatively cheap furniture of a high quality of design for a large market but politics and events overtook their wider marketing and if there were options it was usually with the same frame but with a choice between a chair with arms and one without. Alvar Alto, through the company Artek, certainly understood the commercial potential of marketing and international sales but it was the American company Herman Miller, marketing the designs of Charles and Ray Eames, and Fritz Hansen marketing the designs of Arne Jacobsen who really established the potential for large-scale production of well-designed furniture in the years through the late 1940s and the 1950s.

Republic of Fritz Hansen

note:

Shell chairs for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen - including the Egg and the Swan - were designed in this same period - in the mid 1950s - but were made in foam and upholstered so presented different problems and resulted in a very different aesthetic so they will be the subject of a separate set of posts.

Webbing

/

the woven seat of the Shaker chair in the collection of Designmuseum Danmark

 

 

In 1942, when the cabinetmakers Rud. Rasmussem made a copy of a Shaker rocking chair, the webbing for the seat, imitating the original, was woven by Lis Ahlmann but the chair did not go into production and, just two years later, when Hans Wegner designed a rather more free interpretation of the Shaker rocking chair to be made for FDB (the Danish Co-op) paper cord was used for the seat.

webbing on traditional upholstery - both chairs  in the collection of Designmuseum Danmark

Red Chair by Kaare Klint

Chair by Børge Mogensen

 

 

Webbing had been used as the support for traditional upholstery through the late 19th and early 20th century as the first layer that was stretched and fixed over the seat frame to support some form of padding that was then covered with fabric or leather but was used on its own for the seats of some Danish chairs in the 1920s and 1930s - one good example being the chairs designed by Edvard Thomsen for the Søndermarken crematorium in 1927 - but then, as paper cord became popular in the 1940s, linen or canvas webbing became less common. 

Hans Wegner used webbing for the seat and back of the Pincer Chair from 1956 and the recliner JH613 (above) and the designer Finn Østergaard - who graduated from the Furniture Department of the School of Arts and Craft in 1975 - produced a range of armchairs and high-backed chairs with woven webbing across the seat and back.

Generally, webbing works best with a square or a rectangular seat … even then, it can be difficult to keep the tension consistent and webbing does stretch more than paper cord with use … and, certainly, webbing cannot be used with the complex joinery of many of the chairs designed by Hans Wegner whereas cord can be taken across curved seat frames or around spindles or down through slots that were cut to avoid or get around arm supports or the mortices and thin splats of chair backs.

Webbing was used more widely in other Scandinavian countries and by several prominent designers … so in Sweden, by Bruno Mathsson and in Finland by Alvar Aalto.

detail of the webbing on a bentwood chair by Alvar Aalto

Chair 406

 

The traditional Shaker webbing - unbleached and a deep cream or buff colour - looks good with Danish oak so it is a pity that it has not been used more often as an alternative to cord for more straightforward chairs. 

 

Shaker style webbing bought from America to recover a chair and photographed on paper cord of the seat of a Wishbone Chair

 

woven rattan or cane on modern chairs

/

Thonet Chair 209 1859 in the collection of Designmuseum Danmark

 

the chair weaver by Paul Sandby 1759

 

Cane or woven rattan was used for furniture through the 17th and in the 18th century in England and France and much of northern Europe but for the first use of cane for modern or early modern furniture probably the best-known examples are the bentwood chairs produced by Michael Thonet in Austria from the second half of the 19th century and then, in the 1920s, woven cane was used for the seats and backs of chairs by designers from the Bauhaus in Germany - particularly the cantilevered chairs with woven cane seats and back by Marcel Breuer but also the MR10 arm chair with a cantilevered frame in chrome tube with woven basketwork seat by Mies van der Rohe designed in 1927.

Perhaps the most famous modern Danish design with woven cane is the Faaborg Chair designed by Kaare Klint. This has cane work across the back rest and for the seat with the cane hand woven, taken through holes in the frame and held in place with pegs or splints of cane.

The traditional pattern has lengths of cane taken across the seat front to back - spaced a few millimetres apart, with canes taken across the seat, interwoven, under and over alternate canes, and then canes are interwoven across diagonally, again in both directions, to create a crisscross with a distinct pattern of octagons. On most chairs the edge is finished with a single cane running around over the holes and held in place by a loop of cane so that the effect looks rather like stitching. Glue can be used on the underside of the seat to hold cut ends in place.

In a cheaper version, cane is woven to the same pattern but as a sheet that is then stretched over the frame of the seat or back rest with the outer edge and loose ends driven down into a narrow channel or groove and held in place with glue and by a spline of cane driven in on the top.

Chairs can also be covered with woven canes that form a tight basket-like surface often with a pattern formed by weaving canes in pairs and the edge is usually finished with a braided pattern in cane run around the seat.

 

Faaborg Chair by Kaare Klint 1914 - the chair was designed to be as light as possible - a good reason for the use of cane - and one consideration was to be able to see the complex pattern of the floor of the gallery through the cane work - weaving the cane must have been difficult particularly around a block of wood that strengthens the leg but also the cane is taken down at an angle to a channel cut around the inner face of the curved pieces that form the frame of the seat

Chair designed by Kaare Klint for the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen - the chair was designed to be used with a leather-covered cushion - the batten fixed to the inner side of the seat rail makes the weaving of the cane easier and reinforces the frame of the seat

Chair B64 by Marcel Breuer 1928

 

Detail of chair 6107  made by Fritz Hansen about 1934 and in the style of the chair by Marcel Breuer - note how cut ends of canes are tucked up into a channel cut along the underside of the frame

 
 

The Round Chair designed by Hans Wegner in 1949 -

note how the canes are crossed over at the edge to form a pattern for a border but actually the technique is the way of taking the canework around the leg and rather than going completely over the frame of the seat, the cane is taken back through a long slot

unlike seats in paper cord, the cane is just taken across the top of the frame rather returning on the underside to form a double layer

 

detail of chair CH27 designed by Hans Wegner in 1951 - a complex arrangement of slots and loops to take the cane around the main structural parts of the chair - the basket weave pattern has paired canes running front to back with spaces and paired canes but without gaps running across the seat

Bull Chair JH518 by Hans Wegner 1961 - here the pattern of the weave has to accommodate the deep bow to the front of the chair so the basket pattern proper only starts with the first cane running across immediately beyond the front legs

 

The Folding Chair JH512 by Hans Wegner from 1949 - here the space where the cane work is interrupted by the handle becomes a feature of the pattern with a rib or border at the front and a wide space or band across the seat and here the canes running from front back are crossed over in pairs 

 

detail of cantilevered chair designed by Mogens Lassen in 1936 - an amazing basket woven around a frame of tubular steel - tightly binding cane around sections of the frame is also found on chairs in wood at this time - the cane here is where the hands rest when you are sitting in the chair and are the parts of the chair you might hold and press down on as you stand up - the pattern of the basketwork gives a rounded rather than a sharp front edge against the back of the legs of the person sitting in the chair

 

cane seat on the Colonial Chair by Ole Wanscher

/
 

 

The Colonial Chair was designed by Ole Wanscher in 1949 and was made by the cabinetmaker P Jeppesen. The chair has leather cushions that are supported across the back by very thin slats that were inspired by Shaker chairs made in the United States from the middle of the 19th century. However, the seat is cane woven over a simple frame that drops down onto battens on the inner bottom edge of the seat rails whereas in the American chairs the seat has cloth webbing.

There is a relatively-simple grid or open basket weave pattern, rather than the traditional honeycomb formed by canes taken across the seat diagonally as the cane work is simply support for the cushion.

The chair is amazingly light with the frame reduced to the thinnest dimensions possible.

 

For a longer post on the Colonial Chair

chairs with seats in paper cord

/

The Shaker-style chair CH36 (top) by Hans Wegner from 1962 with the dining chair CH23 designed by Wegner in 1950 shown from the side and a detail of the seat of chair PP112 from 1978 

 

Twisted paper cord woven across an open wood frame has been used to form the seats of Danish chairs since the 1940s but through the 1950s and 1960s paper cord became perhaps the most distinctive and, for some people, the type of seat most closely associated with chairs from the Danish Modern period … Hans Wegner used paper cord for many of his most important chairs including the Windsor-style Rocking Chair and the Chinese Chair - both designed in 1944 - the Peacock Chair from 1947; the Wishbone Chair that was produced by Carl Hansen & Son from 1950 and then for a series of remarkable chairs including the CH44 from 1965, with its thin seat and four thin slats across the back, in a style reminiscent of Shaker chairs, and the PP201 from 1969 that could hardly be more refined and elegant.

The idea of weaving a chair seat across the open frame of a chair was not new: antique Danish chairs with seats in twisted straw survive from the 18th century and from even earlier there are chairs with rudimentary seats in rope and then, from the 19th century, split cane or rattan was used to form the seats and backs of chairs. *

Woven cane and even basket-like seats were used for several early, modern chairs and interlaced woven canvas webbing and even interlaced strips of leather were used for seats and backs in several chairs designed in the 1930s but as war engulfed Europe and, in this context, more important as war overtook the Far East it became more difficult and then impossible to source rattan or cane and merchant shipping was first disrupted and then soon became impossible for transporting anything but essential goods - not just in the Baltic and North Sea but around Africa and across the Indian Ocean.

Several articles suggest that initially paper cord was developed in the war as an alternative to string for wrapping parcels … but, so far, I have found no references to indicate which Danish paper mills first produced paper cord or when production started and no reference to indicate who,- which designer or which furniture maker - first used paper cord on a chair as an alternative to cane.

Paper cord used by Danish companies is twisted with three strands that form a cord 3.5 to 3.6mm thick … although this is usually expressed as 7 strands to an inch. It is generally unbleached - so a natural colour - although a number of chairs are produced with an option to have black cord or even white bleached paper cord. However, it is the natural light brown or dark cream colour that seems to work particularly well with oak but can also look striking when there is slightly more contrast with a darker wood for the chair frame such as walnut. Natural cord works well with wood that has been stained black but I'm not easily convinced that it works as well with white or with pale wood like ash or the colour of beech that tends to darken over time to a yellow.

There are videos on the internet that take you through the process of weaving a seat for anyone wanting to restore a chair. Perhaps the most difficult part is to keep the tension right across the whole seat and to keep the lines of cord regular and straight, particularly the diagonal line running in to the centre when it has that pattern of weaving, and difficult to do it properly so the pattern remains even as the weaving settles into place. Generally, the cords running front to back seem tighter than the cords running in from each side.

Apparently, most paper cord is lightly waxed so, to some extent, resists dirt and the web site for Carl Hansen has useful suggestions for how to clean and maintain paper cord. With care a good seat is said to last up to 60 years before it needs to be rewoven.

 

note:

 *Early examples are illustrated in Danske Bondemøbler by Axel Steenberg and the distinct arrangement of the seat rails found on many of the modern chairs with paper cord - with the side rails set higher than the front rail forming the hollow shape of the seat - can be seen on several of these earlier chairs.

 

The use of paper cord developed with two basic patterns and, in terms of the form of the frame of the seat, these types were not interchangeable … generally a chair has to have an arrangement of the frame or the rails of the seat that is appropriate for the specific type of woven seat.

basket weave in paper cord

The woven or basket form of seat is close to the techniques that had been developed for rattan or cane seats. Generally they have a single woven layer of cords across the top of the seat with cords running straight back from the front rail and then cords running across the seat going over and under and usually over pairs of cords rather than over and under every other cord. Spaces between paired cords are created by winding the cord several times around the seat frame before returning across the seat with the next line of weaving.

As paper cord is softer, so not as fine or as tough as cane, the traditional cane pattern - with a grid and then with diagonal canes woven in and out across the seat to form an octagonal pattern - is not possible. Any pattern, above and beyond the basket weave, is restricted to leaving bands or gaps often with crossing over cords to form a pattern, with a series of X crosses, and generally that is kept to the edge of the seat.

Paper cord is not appropriate for weaving through holes in the frame - a technique used with cane - in part because it is too thick and in part because turned at a sharp angle and then under stress with the weight of someone sitting down, the cord would sheer on the edge of the hole. Nor can cord be used successfully with a round or curved seat … split cane has a flat back so tends to keep in position where it crosses over and round the seat rails but the round paper cord seems to slide or move slightly so many chairs have a rounding off or recess in the areas where the cord will pass around the rail that helps keep it in place and running back straight. The only way to keep the cord in position is to use metal staples or bent over nails and with most cord seats these are kept to a minimum … on most chairs used just at the start to hold the end of the cord in place or where an awkward angle, for instance around a leg, would mean that cords could drop down or cut the angle of the corner if not held in place.

The basket pattern seat is normally woven over quite deep front and back rails that on many chairs are curved down to create a more appropriate cushion shape … one chair in particular  - the CH23 by Hans Wegner from 1951 - imitates closely the profile of the Red Chair with its deep front rail to the seat.

In the most straightforward form of chair, the seat rails are simply spindles, rather like the stretchers, or are slightly wider than they are high but even then little thicker than the stretchers. On the Wishbone Chair the seat is just 30mm thick including the seat frame and the cord passing across the top and back under. This is important because earlier rush seats or seats in twisted straw tended to be quite bulky and uneven so looked crude or rustic - fine in an old home in a country farmhouse or village cottage but not so appropriate in a Copenhagen apartment - but actually the paper cord seat - as developed by Wegner for a chair like the CH44 from 1965 - with its thin seat and four thin slats across the back in a style reminiscent of Shaker chairs or the PP201 from 1969 - could hardly be more refined and elegant.

As paper cord was used on more and more sophisticated chairs there are more and more intriguing designs developed to take the paper down in front of or around rails or around back splats. This often meant taking the cord through slots in the frame rather than across and over the full section of a side rail.

 

Dining-room chair CH23 designed by Wegner in 1950

 

PP63

by Hans Wegner from 1975 - pairs of cords running front to back are spaced out with the cord taken seven times around the rail before the pair is taken back across the seat to create a much more open weave pattern

 

the Wishbone Chair type of seat woven with paper cord

Chair for FDB by Jørgen Bækmark

 

The second form of woven seat is the type where the cord is taken completely over the seat rail and returned across the underside so in appearance looks almost like a cord seat pad with little or none of the frame left exposed.

The Peacock Chair has a robust frame but with the rails of the seat that are much wider than they are high so they are strong but still not bulky. In this chair the front, side and back rails of the seat are all at the same level with the turned legs driven through a hole towards each corner and held in place by splitting vertically down into the top of the leg with a wedge driven in from above. This is made into an attractive feature of the construction by being made with care and being left exposed so the cords of the seat are set in from the corners of the seat but the X-shaped pattern of the cords is the same as that on the Wishbone and later chairs.

Seat rails are, at the very least, rounded on the inner edge to reduce wear but on several chairs the inner upper corner of the rail is taken down to form a chamfer or perhaps more accurately a slope that sets a hollow shape for the seat and, again, reduces the stress on the cord where a sharp angle might cause it to wear or break.

Photographs of the paper cord seat of a Wishbone Chair are shown in a separate post.

 

Påfuglestolen or Peacock Chair JH550 designed by Hans Wegner in 1947