Nendos N01 chairs for Fritz Hansen in the dining room
When it comes to high-quality furniture designs with cult status you cannot ignore the Danish manufacturer Fritz Hansen. Since its beginnings as a carpentry business at the end of the 19th century, the company has principally produced seating furniture. In the course of the 20th century Fritz Hansen realised numerous armchair and chair designs that continue to impress with their functionality and elegance, and that are indispensable in private and public spaces - in addition to being found in the most important design museums. Among the Fritz Hansen chairs, these designs include, for example, the Series 7 chair by Arne Jacobsen - a classic that is available in various designs, including the Series 7 Swivel Armchair and the Series 7 Kids Chair, and continues to enjoy great popularity. A chair design, which in turn was developed in collaboration with contemporary designers is the N01 chair: created by the design studio Nendo and which combines Danish design tradition and Japanese design conception.
Drop chair by Arne Jacobsen
Serie 7 3107 New Colours from Fritz Hansen
Serie 7 3107 New Colours from Fritz Hansen
With furniture, as with so much in life, it is rarely the showy, high profile, works, or individuals, that teach us most, but those works, and those individuals, who in their anonymity and modesty accompany us in invisible silence. Or rather the anonymous and...
...Originating in context of, and presented parallel to, the exhibition Chairs: Dieckmann!... de/burg-galerie/ Chairs: Dieckmann!...
..."1 With the exhibition Chairs: Dieckmann!... 2 And indeed unlike Junge Dieckmann was a member of the NSDAP; and as Aya Soika convincingly discusses in the Chairs: Dieckmann!...
...With the exhibition Chairs... Chairs...
...For our part we were particularly perturbed by the claim in the section on Plastic Chairs that the high sales figures for Gerd Lange's early 1970s Flex 2000 indicate that "Thonet had its finger on the pulse of the plastic age" If there's one thing the Thonet (hi)story teaches us it is that "plastic age" (largely) passed them by, that having established the company on two material/technological innovations they missed a third, lest we forget, which we can't because they are two examples in the exhibition, in the 1950s & 60s Thonet cooperated with Verner Panton on wooden chairs, you do the math... A state of affairs Bentwood and Beyond with its inter-twinned specific and general discussions on 200 years of modern furniture design very convincingly, satisfyingly, underscores and reinforces; despite moments such as Plastic Chairs or Super Normal Bentwood and Beyond isn't a hagiographic celebration of Thonet, but a series of reflections on Thonet in context of wider realities, a series of reflections on the (hi)story of furniture design and the path to our contemporary furniture understandings through the conduit of Thonet, and for all an exhibition which tends to underscore and reinforce the truism that continually evolving social, cultural, economic, technical, et al realities not only carries design forth but defines, and continually redefines, our relationships to our objects of daily use, demanding the new, discarding the obsolete, the foolish, the faddish while preserving, nurturing, certain universal archetypes as it rolls onwards...
