Bent wood - Masterly technique

The bentwood heralded the era of the industrial production of chairs.

Chairs by Thonet - Icons of bent solid wood

The inventor of bentwood was Michael Thonet (1796-1871), whose historic coffeehouse chair 214 and other seating furniture are still manufactured in the traditional way. Original chairs can be recognized by the Thonet seal with the year of manufacture below the seat. The bentwood heralded the era of industrial chair production. 36 coffee house chairs could be accommodated in a box of one cubic metre - of course only in parts assembled on site. The coffee house chair from 1859 was sold a total of 50 million times by 1930; the chair with iconic status was sold as far away as the Far East, making it a world bestseller. The bentwood chair is now available not only with wickerwork seat, but also in a wide variety of materials, colours and upholstery with fabric cover or leather. In addition to the coffee house chair, there are other design classics, the THONET S 209 with implied armrests, and the THONET 118 in beech, whose design is based on the famous Frankfurt kitchen chair. To this day, Thonet is still an internationally positioned company and family business that manufactures in Germany.

Bentwood - a modern invention from the 19th century

The technique of wood bending was developed by Michael Thonet; it involves bending wood by steam and then drying it in a metal mould. This process makes the bent wood permanently dimensionally stable. Thonet bentwood chairs and other products are exhibited in design museums around the world.

Wooden chairs from the Bauhaus
Almost 100 years later Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) designed chairs made of wood. Breuer became famous for his tubular steel furniture; in fact he designed numerous extravagant wooden chairs at the age of 22. The journeyman's piece of the Dessau carpenter apprentice is the "lady's toilet table" for the show house Am Horn. Breuer also designed avant-garde wooden furniture such as the African Chair and ran the furniture workshop in Dessau from 1925 to 1928, where he also designed the famous cantilever chairs and the B3 Club chair, better known as the Wassily Chair from 1925. New forms, simple functionality and unusual materials secured Breuer a place in the design history of the 20th century.

By hook or crook in the USA

Midcentury Design: not only in Germany, but also in the USA experiments were carried out. The married couple Charles (1907-1978) and Ray Eames (1912-1988) developed chairs for the post-war period that were designed to be affordable for a broad section of the population. Although the two designers mainly experimented with plastic and created a series of Eames Fiberglass Chairs for the Vitra company, there is a design icon in wood and leather, the luxurious swivel chair Vitra Lounge Chair from 1956, which also used the shock mounts (rubber-metal connections) developed by the Eames for greater seating comfort. The famous Vitra La Chaise and the Rocking Armchair Rod Base (RAR) also have runners made of curved wood.

Wood with format

Wood is a renewable raw material and every piece of furniture made of wood is unique; that is why pieces of furniture made of wood enjoy great popularity. A lot of experience is needed to bring wood into desired shapes, because this natural material is individual and behaves in the same way. The material can be bent to tension, like the bow of the same name. It is common to use moisture (water) and heat (steam), as in the famous bentwood chairs, which get their name from the bent woods. Laminated and moulded plywood can also be pressed into a desired shape using steam. The wood of beech is well suited, it is tough and short-fibred. Beech wood works, expands and contracts again. Therefore a glued veneer stack with a weight of 300 tons is pressed. The most beautiful veneer forms the first layer.

Outlook for wood processing in 2020

New processes for bent wood: Modern incision processes (parallel cuts at regular intervals) make the wood very flexible and give it a textile character - the disadvantage of this process is that the stability of the material is reduced. A completely new product on the market is 3-D veneer: If the wood is exposed to 100 degrees heat for five minutes, a fabric is created that can be shaped three-dimensionally, thin strips that are stabilised with tacking threads.


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