Einstein and Thonet

Albert Einstein leaning against a Thonet Chair in Madrid, 1923

Albert Einstein

leaning against a Thonet or Thonet alike bentwood chair in Madrid, 1923.

I received this photo today as a nice surprise for publication here from one of our Spanish readers, Álvaro de la Cruz-Dombriz. Thank you Álvaro!

The big question for me is now: “Is it a Thonet chair, and, if so, what model?” Note the leg ends resting in copper or zinc pods.

Excellent for our Chairchez L’Homme series.

Update

Álvaro suggests in a comment this is the Thonet no. 20. However, I’m not sure or just headstrong . My first reaction when seeing the photo was: “Not a Thonet”, because if you compare the diameter of the back with the body of Einstein, the bentwood back is almost arm thick. Usually a back of a Thonet Chair is much thinner. However it is very well possible: I’ve checked Swiss Thonet expert Dieter Staedeli’s gallery of Wiener Moebel: He comments:

Thonet no. 20

Thonet No.20 chair of Vienna, around 1872. The model went into production 1870-71. The early 20s are made in a very strait and not very comfortable back design. But this very chair form is exemplary for the first production models and are sought after collectibles. At about 1875 found in all models of Thonet chair gradually switching to ergonomic back forms

Update 2: A Thonet or not a Thonet?

Further to the comment of Geert, I found a nice Bentwood dedicated blog which featured a Thonet (Halb?)fauteuil no 20:

Thonet Fauteuil no. 20

Update 3: Chairvertizing

I’ve added this post to our Chairvertizing series. What is better than to use a famous person to make your chair (more) famous, or the other way around: Take a famous chair to become (more) famous yourself;-)

Last edited by Guido J. van den Elshout on December 15, 2011 at 5:36 PM

Thonet Store in Frankfurt

Thonet Store in Frankfurt
Hot from our own The Chair-Blog Daily:

Thonet opens Flagshipstore in Frankfurt

It features a diversity of modern and timeless furniture across design history: from the famous bentwood coffee house chair to tubular steel furniture from the Bauhaus era to the most recent designs by renowned designers and architects. The store’s interior design offers an overview of our program, from the contract to the living segment.
The Square in Frankfurt

With a total floor area of more than 200,000 square meters and a length of 660 m THE SQUAIRE is currently Europe’s largest office and business building. It is situated in the center of mobility at Frankfurt Airport above the long-distance train station in direct vicinity to the autobahn.

THONET Store
West 11, Ebene 5 (Atrium), Flughafen
D-60600 Frankfurt

T. +49 69 794 02 77 0

forum@thonet-forum.de
www.thonet-forum.de

Opening hours
Monday through Friday 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.
Saturday 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Closed on Sundays

Ben K. Mickus Relief Chair added to Cooper Hewitt Collection

Relief-Chair-by-Ben-K-Mickus
A long time ago we featured the Relief Chair by Ben K. Mickus.

Last year Cooper Hewitt added it to its permanent collection.

I revisited his site because I remembered it is exemplary with respect to public relations: For instance Bloggers who have mentioned the chair get a whole page (click “news” and “blogs” on his site):

Mickus-Projects-Press-Page-Bloggers

Exemplary in design and simplicity: The thumbnails are linked to a pdf of the article and the www link under the thums link to the actual article.

Fondly I saw the old layout of our site: For a long time we’ve used the WordPress default theme:

chair-blog-relief-chair

So you can see blogs do change their lay out. Also I’ve noticed I changed the title of the post and I see other things I don’t do anymore. Oh Nostalgia.

On the other hand I’d hoped to see Ben going on with designing some more chairs.

Note: in writing this post I got so annoyed with the load time of the posts and pages due to load time consuming social bookmarks that I’ve totally disabled them. Sorry lads and lasses!

Chromatic Chair by Matt Sindall

Chromatic Chair by Matt Sindall Front
Chromatic Chair by Matt Sindall

Matt Sindall, a Brit in Paris, found us through our FB page. His chromatic chair has a lenticular film applied to cover a plywood carcass and causes the colors to change under differend light conditions and angles….actually he should produce a video to show the effect.

Top 5 of Chairblog in October 2011

1) Aviator Chair by David Catta: 479 views.

Aviator Chair by David Catta

2) Ultra Lounge Chair by Steve Vowels: 460 views:

Ultra Lounge Chair by Steve Vowels 1

3) Sofa by Peter Opsvik: 445 views:

Sofa by Peter Opsvik

4) Lavatory Seats at Blackrainbow Shop in Paris: 433 views:

5)The Best of Chair Blog in September 2011: 411 views:

The Best of Chair Blog in October 2011

October marked a migration from a London based VPS server to an Amsterdam based VPS server somewhere in the Cloud.
After weeding out some setting errors the blog is up and running fine, without outages thus far for more than 7 consecutive days. Off course there will be some trimming behind the screens.

47,271 visits with 106,478 page views, despite the dwindling of the number of posts from 54 to 26, notably because of all the hosting issues we had to address.

Hopefully the hosting remains stable and we can proceed full ahead in November. Hope to see you all back!