If you search Joaquim Tenreiro, you automatically find R & Company who have several Tenreiro chairs in stock. They specialize in Brazilean design. Good to know.
Han Pieck Chair LaWo 1
Han Pieck (23) was born as son to Henri Pieck a twin from Anton Pieck who was a famous Dutch illustrator who also designed the fairy park “The Efteling”
Han is known for designing one chair, the LAWO 1 which stands for LAminated WOod. He designed LAWO number one from one plate of laminated wood. With a grant from the Mashall plan he was able to start a manufacturing company for which he designed a laminating machine according to a special procedure: Layers of veneer were laminated together in a mold while the glue was applied hot, but the veneer remained cold. Like a sort of magnetron. Initially there were startup problems to get an evenly molded laminate. The times were not ripe for the model and finally the manufacturing company went bankrupt. The manufacturing process was sold to a Scottish company, Morris and Company, or the company got the process because it offered Piek and his Partner a job. Morris and Company eventually succeeded to create a similar machine under guidance of Pieck.
Happy Chair
Sometimes I find images of chairs on the world wide web of which I cannot find their provenance. This tubular Happy Chair is one of those. It is a nice variation on the cantilever chair. I hope my readers can help me.
Maya Lin Longitude Chaise
This Longitude Chaise by Maya Lin was sold at Phillips as Lot 38 for $3,250. It had an estimate of $5,000 – 7,000. It belonged to her “the Earth is (Not) Flat” series.
About Maya Lin
In 1981, at age 21 and while still an undergraduate, Maya Lin won a public design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, beating 1,441 other competition submissions. The black cut-stone masonry wall, with the names of 57,661 fallen soldiers carved into its face, was completed in late October 1982 and dedicated on November 13, 1982. It is granite and V-shaped, with one side pointing to the Lincoln Memorial and the other to the Washington Monument.
Lin’s conception was to create an opening or a wound in the earth to symbolize the gravity of the loss of the soldiers. The design was initially controversial for what was an unconventional and non-traditional design for a war memorial. Opponents of the design also voiced objection because of Lin’s Asian ethnicity, her being female, and her lack of professional experience. The memorial has since become an important pilgrimage site for relatives and friends of the American military casualties in Vietnam, and personal tokens and mementos are left at the wall daily in their memory. In 2007, the American Institute of Architects ranked the memorial #10 on their list of America’s Favorite Architecture.
Lin believes that if the competition had not been “blind”, with designs submitted by number instead of name, she “never would have won”. She received harassment after her ethnicity was revealed. Prominent businessman and later third party presidential candidate Ross Perot called her an “egg roll” after it was revealed that she was Asian. Lin defended her design in front of the United States Congress, and eventually a compromise was reached. A bronze statue of a group of soldiers and an American flag was placed off to one side of her design.
A video from her lets you think about the environment:
Four side chairs by Joaquim Tenreiro
Sold at Phillips on December 13, 2016: Four side chairs by Joaquim Tenreiro. Sold for $16,250.
About Joaquim Tenreiro
Joaquim Tenreiro (1906-1992) is the pioneer of modernist Brazilian furniture making. A forerunner in the use of rediscovered raw materials as well as the creator of a new formal language in 20thcentury Brazilian furniture design, he drew on the lessons of past furniture making as a vital source, not only in the mastery of technical and constructive solutions, but also in the aesthetic experience, craftsmanship, and the cultural meaning of his production. His exquisitely crafted pieces evoke a refined coexistence of traditional values and modern aesthetics, strongly bound to the Brazilian cultural milieu.
Born in Portugal to a family with a great tradition in furniture making, he moved to Brazil in 1928 at the age of 22. He embarked on a career as a designer by working at various furniture manufacturers such as Leandro Martins, Francisco Gomes and Laubisch & Hirth, which catered to wealthy Brazilian families eager to buy furniture with a conservative design that imitated traditional European styles. Tenreiro’s vast experience in arts and crafts as well as furniture design was naturally contrary to such bourgeois expectations. Explicitly reacting against what he perceived as provincialism of a colonized society, Tenreiro proposed a contemporary language and advocated the idea that Brazilian furniture should be “formally light…A lightness which has nothing to do with weight itself, but with graciousness, and the functionality of spaces.”
In the early 1940s, Tenreiro founded his own furniture studio, Langenbach & Tenreiro Ltda, where his work began to gain more recognition. However, it was not until the 1950s that he began to be recognized as a master furniture designer in Brazil. His design philosophy found a great response with architects who supported modernism. Tenreiro found in Oscar Niemeyer his greatest client, designing furniture for his houses and completely breaking away from the virtuosity of antique styles. He developed a language adapted to the country’s heat, using wicker and Brazilian hardwoods in abundance.
In spite of his success and his professional recognition, Tenreiro closed his furniture studio in 1967 and decided to devote himself exclusively to fine arts, taking up once again a path that he had discontinued long before. During the next following decades until his death in 1992, his works were included in many art and design exhibitions held at renowned galleries and museums in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. A forerunner in the truest sense of the word, the “father” of modern furniture in Brazil left behind an unrivaled aesthetic legacy.
Via R and Company