Chairs, Chair Design and Chair Designers
Via a comment one of my readers sent me photo’s of a mystery bentwood chair. From what I know from Thonet, they never produced bentwood chairs with styles of turned wood.
No labels or other imprints than an 8, or is it a scorpio or crab alike sign?
Maybe our readership has an idea?
Update
Via Google lens I landed on a platform where a similar chair was presented as a Fischel Vienna Chair Mercado Libre where I found the following photo:
Green PK8 Armchair by Paulo Kobylka for Boobam, a Brasilean company curating (offering a trading platform for) furniture and illumination produced by Brasilean Artists and craftsmen.
Berlin Daybed by Bruno Mathson
Lawless Sofa by Evan Fay via 1st Dibs
I’ve been focusing on intuitive construction methods and spontaneous form building with industrial materials to make furniture. My aim is to rhythmically grow each piece to realize a liminal position between metaphor and utility. The forms pursue beauty within chaos while expressing an honest craft on obvious construction to reimagine seating objects that discover a poetic moment in design.
Wittmann is an Austrian furniture manufacturer who started as a saddler in 1896 and who obtained reproduction rights of furniture designed by Josef Hoffmann. I hapened to pass their Vienna showroom last week where this Alleegasse chair was on display. I love it.
Josef Hoffmann, born in 1870, studied architecture under Carl von Hasenquer and Otto Wagner at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 1899, at the age of 29, he became a professor at what is now the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 1903 he and Kolo Moser established the Wiener Werkstätte. His first important building, the sanatorium in Purkersdorf, near Vienna, built in 1904, set radical new standards in architecture and interior design. But it was the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, built between 1905 and 1911, that founded his international reputation. Here, Josef Hoffmann succeeded in perfection the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), reconciling art and life, and aestheticizing all aspects of design.