The Thonet No.14 Chair

                         Technical innovation and design result in aesthetic longevity

                                                                                                  Edward Davey

                                                                       RCA/V&A MA History of Design

                                                                                           Spring Term Essay

                                                                                    Submitted: 8 May 2017

                                                                                                     Words: 6448

1) Thonet No.14 Chair on Portuguese stamps.(1)​​​​​​​

2) The Thonet No.14 chair in the V&A collection Museum no. W.31-2011 .  This is an early version, about 1859, the year the chair was first produced.

I would like to thank Livia Rezende, Sarah Cheang, Spike Sweeting, Sarah Teasley & Neil Taylor from the V&A and RCA History of Design department for their helpful comments and advice.

I would also like to thank Max Donnelly curator Furniture, Textiles and Fashion at the V&A Museum for his helpful comments and advice.

INTRODUCTION​​​​​​​

The Thonet No.14 chair, illustration 2, designed by Michael Thonet (German cabinetmaker 1796-1871 illustration 3), has been the subject many comments over the years [3]. Since the creation of the Thonet No. 14 chair in 1859, the chair has remained in continuous production due to its popularity. The Thonet No.14 chair design has not fundamentally changed since then. Due to continuous fabrication from the first chair to the present day, this product is in fact simultaneously in a state of combined perpetual motion and, in a design sense, of stasis.

The Thonet manufacturing company, now called Thonet GmbH based in Frankenberg Germany, is still a family run business and one of Europe’s oldest manufacturers and its oldest furniture manufacturer [4]. The Thonet No.14 Chair, now the Thonet 214 chair (the numbers refer to the catalogue number), has been of historic importance for over one hundred and fifty-five years and has been the bestselling model. There was a symbiotic relationship of growth within the Thonet Company between industrialisation and the bulk sales of the Thonet No.14 chair.   The manufacturing and societal context is explored and Thonet’s achievements considered. 

In the nineteen twenties the Thonet No.14 chair had a major re-appraisal, being lauded by Modernists reconsidering the mid-nineteenth century Austro-Hungarian Hapsburgian product, re-contextualising the chair for the then contemporary modernity. Due to its plain and clean design the Thonet No.14 chair is considered one of the cornerstones of modern furniture design[5]. Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier led the avant-garde rallying cry to frame this chair within the Machine Age[6]. Perhaps it was ironic; the Thonet No.14 chair has always been redolent of industrialised processes, embodying the very essence of the spirit of ‘The Machine Age’, despite the chair having initially gone into production many years before[7].

3) Illustration of Michael Thonet from the 1904 catalogue, which proclaims he is the inventor of bentwood furniture; it says his motto is ‘to bend or to break’[9].

The plurality of approaches towards commentary on the Thonet No.14 chair is symptomatic of the variety of settings for this multi-million selling artefact. Therefore this fascinating period of observation is not cohesive, as found with the position of writers published around 2009, nor a structural change of the chair into a modernist icon as found in the literature emanating from the high modernists Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier. Many of the commentators who at other times narrated the Thonet No.14 chair’s history are acknowledged within this essay.  

Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos are two of the most important modernists architects and theoreticians who, though commentary, reframed the chair’s identity within a design idiom.  Loos’s and Le Corbusier’s words helped redefine the chair from the doldrums of what architects believed to be pre-functionalism when viewed through the Modernist lens.

The Thonet No.14 chair lends itself to be an ideal model of what is implied by the debate on industrial design by Siegfried Giedion and Nicholas Pevsner which arose from analysis of the position held by each. The Thonet No.14 chair is thought of as an icon in the history of the industrial revolution.  Therefore there was created a panoply of historical resonance around the chair’s creation and it can be evaluated in this light.

There was widespread reappraisal of the chair in the design world around 2009, as this was the 150th anniversary of its production. I examine this comparatively recent celebratory literature and seek out the common threads among comments on this chair and why, for commentators, this chair is of such importance. There is a lot of antique furniture that is 150 years old or older which we do not celebrate.   It is in fact the manufacturing line that is of importance to the 150th birthday as there is a continuous supply of the contemporary classic Thonet No.14 chair, to the public the same as the first one produced in 1859. It is this enduring stream of furniture from the mid-nineteenth century, evocative of fin de siècle Viennese modernism and romanticism which forms the basis of public appreciation and commentators’ articles, illustration 4.

Not many chairs originally priced the same as a bottle of wine are critically re-appraised in this way. Alice Rawsthorn and Stephen Bayley have different approaches, but both bring the Thonet Chair No14 to the attention of a potentially far wider spectrum of people, informing them what the chair and its creator had achieved.  

4) A Thonet bentwood chair is used in this picture by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – ‘At the Moulin Rouge’, Paris 1892-1895.[10] Viennese fin de siècle modernism translated over many areas of Europe and beyond through its use.

Michael Thonet’s original prototyping using steaming and veneers stemmed from his cabinetmaking workshop activities from 1819 in the town of his birth, Boppard am Rhein, Germany.  Thonet’s first bent plywood designs date back to 1830[11].  His pursuit of volume production Biedermeier furniture using steamed laminated bentwood techniques led later to the developments for his No.14 chair.  Success in bentwood veneered chairs led to orders from South America.  Glue dissolves in high humidity, encountered during shipping and in situ, so Thonet resolved to use solid wood.  Coopers and cartwrights had been bending wood for centuries and in the 1820s Englishman Isaak Sargent had developed a method of bending wood by softening it in hot water[12].

Thonet’s subsequent and vital development was to invent a three-dimensional mould with steel inlay from which wood, after being heated by steam, retained its shape when cooled at seventy degrees over twenty hours, allowing the wood to set in both compressive and in tensile strengths, illustration 5[13]. Solid beech wood which has a long grain was primarily used; material science was of great importance to Michael Thonet.

5) The wooden former moulds, with metal inlay, that are used to create the shape of the No.14 chair.[14]   This technique enabled the production of a whole range of bentwood furniture with identical components.

The sequence below, illustration 6 show the progression of Thonet’s chair designs slowly stripping out additional elements leading to the refinement of Chair no 14. 

6) Sequence of chairs culminating in model no 14[15]

After success with selling chairs, type d above, to Café Daum in Vienna, illustration 7, Thonet targeted cafés as potential markets for his chairs[16].

7) The Thonet No.4 chair for Café Daum, Michael Thonet’s first big success in manufacturing a Viennese café chair in 1849. [17]

The continuing development of Chair no 14 occurs in its pared back simplicity; the other vital aspect of its change from the previous Café Daum design lies in the use of fixings for assembly instead of glue and joinery, as shown in illustration 8.  This enabled the chair to be transported unassembled, a crucial aspect of its future success. 

8) Development of Chair no 14 [18]

The ingenious design of merely six components with a few fixings is shown in illustration 9.

9) The constituent parts of the Thonet No.14 chair.[19]    

10) An advertising poster showing the full range of 26 items for sale in 1859 by Gebrüder Thonet[20].  Chair no 14 is shown bottom left.

11) The revised Chair no 14 with a stabilising ring below the seat and stiffening wing attachments between back and seat, 1881.[22] 

12) Solid seat version of Chair no 14.[23]

In 1841 Michael Thonet exhibited at the Koblenz fair.  He came to the attention of Prince Metternich, the State Chancellor of Austria and a fellow Rhinelander, who immediately recognised Thonet’s ideas as according with his own intentions of promoting Austria’s industrialisation; he urged Thonet to relocate to Vienna[24].  Thonet visited Vienna in 1842 and stayed there.  He had been bankrupted by over-reaching himself on patents for steam bending wooden laminates[25].  Thonet’s creditors in Boppard am Rhein confiscated his belongings so his family joined him in Vienna.  In 1849 Thonet opened his own shop and the firm Thonet Gebrüder was formed in 1853, passing control to his sons[26].

Thonet achieved recognition from the Austro-Hungarian government.  The firm was granted a patent in 1856 for exclusive manufacturing use of his new pragmatic method to “bend any type of wood, even the most brittle, into the desired forms and curves by chemical and mechanical means”[27].   Intellectual patenting gave Michael Thonet a monopoly on his bentwood production throughout the vast free trade block of the Habsburg Empire; this led to an immense expansion of Michael Thonet’s company towards the end and after his life. The birth of the Thonet No. 14 chair in 1859 was safely cushioned in intellectual patenting, illustration 13.  

13) Stamps showing authenticity of the chair to help enforce IP laws.[28]

The Thonet No.14 chair had been specifically designed to be constructed in components and was constructed originally out of six steamed bentwood parts plus fixings, see illustration 9 above, and is perhaps one of the first widely distributed items of flat pack furniture ever.  The components could be transported with great ease and reduced costs, leading to the low price point of the Thonet No.14 chair internationally.   Thirty-six of the unassembled steam bent chairs can fit into one cubic metre box, illustration 14.  The chairs would be assembled for sale at the country of destination under the supervision of one of the distribution centres, illustration 15.  This took full advantage of changes occurring in the Hapsburg Empire which was experiencing a number of changes to barriers of trade; the abolition of internal tariffs, the formation of a customs union and the reorganisation of its money system with centralised banks based in Vienna enabling capital expenditure.  These formed a significant context for the growth of the bentwood industry and worldwide expansion of its markets[29].

14) The components of thirty six Thonet No.14 chairs fit into this meter cubed box.[30]

15) A Thonet poster showing the head showrooms and distribution points for the Thonet Company and the Thonet No.14 chair around Europe in 1885.  In Michael Thonet’s lifetime there were 25 international showrooms.[31]

The Thonet No.14 chair is elevated through a transition from an item of craft furniture into an industrial product as seen by the use of the principle of product standardisation, interchangeable parts and specialised manufacturing machinery[32]. It was the Koritchan factory in Moravia illustration 16, completed in 1856, which was to produce the mass industrial production of the Thonet No.14 chair. The Koritchan site also benefited from dense local beech woodland for harvesting, railway facilities and a pool of cheap labour to work in the factory.[33] The principles of the chair’s production at the Koritschan factory were based on Adam Smith’s Ideas of the division of labour and utilizing technology found in the Industrial revolution[34].

16) The Koritchan factory in Moravia completed in 1856, which was to produce the mass industrial production of the Thonet No.14 chair.[35]

Thonet was one of the most important industrialists ever; he created a blueprint for mass production and pioneered the concept of vertical business integration[36]. Decades later Henry Ford would advance ideas of factory production. It does not appear that Michael Thonet received adulation akin to Henry Ford or that Thonet’s advances in industrial processes and manufacturing are spoken about in the same light as Ford’s, even though many concepts relating to factory manufacture were resolved by Thonet.   

The statement ‘There was no Henry Ford of the furniture industry’ must be refuted.[37]  As early as 1860 Thonet owned forests and saw mills as well as railway tracks for the transportation of wood from forests to the factories[38].  Specialised factories owned by Thonet made fixings, tools and machinery plus building materials.   The general expansion of the railways during this period materially helped the integration of his various factories spread through Central Europe and enabled orders to be speedily fulfilled throughout the world.

Demand played a major part in the success of bentwood furniture.  This was one result of population growth, increased incomes, migration to urban centres and the emergence of the middle class[39].  Investment, distribution and management clearly identify the industry as an important example of a modern industrial enterprise.  Other bentwood companies thrived in Austria-Hungary too; the patent upon which Thonet prospered was relinquished in 1869 following action from a rival firm, Jacob & Joseph Kohn, which then reached the same enormous numbers of workforce, had outposts in the Far East and had patented a four-fold direct fastening of the back with the seat which was used by Thonet[40]. The locational factor enabled a pool of labour with special skills, nontraded inputs specific to the industry and technological spillovers.[41]   Between 1870 and 1900 the number of firms in the industry reached about 100 before declining.[42]  Indeed, in 1921 Mundus, J&J Kohn and Thonet amalgamated[43]. 

Demand was also stimulated by exhibitions which were to become a major way of generating interest about the chair. Michael Thonet exhibited in many World Fairs, starting with the Great Exhibition in London 1851. The Thonet No.14 chair was exhibited in the London exhibition of 1862; the jury said it was "an excellent application of a happy thought ... not works of show, but practical furniture for daily use ... simple, graceful, light and strong"[44]. The Thonet No.14 chair received a gold medal when it was shown at the 1867 World Exposition in Paris[45]. Advertising also was of vital importance to the success of the Thonet No.14 chair, also the Thonet Catalogue and showrooms, illustrations 10 and 15, were very important for spreading advertising for the chair. 

The Thonet No. 14 chair was thus the epitome of a mass produced cheap chair to many. This chair became so ubiquitous that the remarkable originality of design and of method of manufacture were liable to be underestimated. The Thonet No.14 chair had sold over fifty million items by 1930[46]. It is the foundation for the Thonet furniture company’s international success[47].  The consistency of sales of the Thonet No.14 chair enabled stable conditions within the company for the development of a vast array of 1700 product lines by 1904; most of these items are now discontinued, but the chair thrives[48]...

There are two fundamental aspects of design pertaining to the success of the Thonet No.14 chair. The first is the design of the chair itself but symbiotically the manufacturing plant also needed to be created for the chair’s production, illustration 13, as set out above. The Thonet No.14 chair’s design has been thoroughly scrutinised.  Widely distributed textural analysis does not record the development of Thonet’s factories themselves.  

17) Four photographs from a Thonet factory where they are making Number 14 chairs. It shows that the factories were concerned with an early form of predefined Scientific Management relating to Adam Smith and the Division of Labour and division of production. Women and men work in different parts of the factory, both are undertaking the same repetitive task relating to one aspect of the furniture’s production[49].

With the factories’ customised machinery and workforce skillsets essential to the Thonet No.14 chair, production is under-examined. The in-depth historical manufacturing developments of the Thonet No.14 chair are casually overlooked.[50]. Possibly this lack of technical information is similar to manufacturers like Ford who allows little public examination of their manufacturing operations with most undertaken in secrecy for commercial reason.  

The overall result of the Thonet endeavours ensured a very modest original cost of the No 14 chair, materially helpful to its prodigious sales.

Adolf Loos (1870-1933) wrote the seminal essay on modernism ‘Ornament and Crime’ in 1908. Loos was a pioneer in changing attitudes to the ornate, paring ornamentation back through his work as an architectural practitioner and theoretician. Loos fought widely against the arbitrary ornamentation of Viennese art nouveau and created a merciless design logic that through his leadership in design and commentary became the foundation of modernist thinking and oeuvre[51]. Loos, who for many years worked to change attitudes in favour of Modernism, said ‘The Thonet (No.14) chair (…) represents the spirit of an age, the enemy of the ornament.’ (1898)[52]. This statement was a critical reappraisal of the chair from its stable of Biedermeier originated Thonet furniture.  

Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French architect (1887-1965), remarked of the Thonet No.14 chair “We have introduced the humble Thonet chair of steamed wood, certainly the most common as well as the least costly of chairs.  And we believe this chair, whose millions of representatives are used on the Continent and in the two Americas, possess nobility”[53] .

Le Corbusier, one of the most important architect of the last hundred years, was one of several architects and designers in the early twentieth century to reframe the Thonet No.14 chair for a modern context[54]. The modern movement embraced the 

bentwood Thonet No.14 chair with its elegant simplistic use of form and materials, situated in buildings that also represented similar characteristics of simplicity. R Jepson said ‘Le Corbusier used Thonet furniture extensively in his early buildings, stating how thoroughly they represented the modernist concepts of economy, durability and humbleness’[55].

Mary McLeod comments “Le Corbusier was deeply concerned with ‘technical’, ‘logistical’, ‘expert’ and ‘solutions’… Both art and politics were placed under his professional rubric, incorporating Taylorism and Fordism and other models of Scientific Management.”[56] In Vers Une Architecture Le Corbusier said "A house is a machine for living in”[57].   The Thonet No.14 chair, a fore runner of Scientific Management, had been appraised by modernists including Le Corbusier to be part of the Machine Age which fitted in very well with Le Corbusier’s rubric of modernity; the Thonet No.14 chair is industrially designed. 

Taken together Le Corbusier’s and Loos’s sentiments are a very powerful indictment for the enhancing of modernist buildings with the Thonet No.14 chair. This did not mean that the Thonet No.14 chair was not appreciated in other design areas. Perhaps because of the simplicity of the chair it gave the object versatility in many different arenas. Other contexts such as coffee shops were left untouched by this new enthusiasm.

It might be that the Thonet No.14 chair arose out of a contemporaneous proto Art Nouveau stable of furniture by Thonet and that functionalism, which had not been defined at the time of the chair’s inception, could never have been on Thonet’s agenda when designing it. Therefore Thonet’s furniture, in particular the Thonet No.14 chair, may have had a role helping to define Functionalism and Modernism for Loos, a reverberation emanating out of analysis leading to his 1898 statement about the Thonet No.14 chair. 

Nikolas Pevsner believed that the modern movement placed more emphasis on the designer than the product. Siegfried Giedion however believed that the development of products are often the fruit of anonymous contributions which might seem of little use for the writing of history of industrial products, but actually place the product in a web of relationships of various kinds[58].

Pevsner’s and Giedion’s approaches relate to different aspects of the Thonet No.14 chair. Michael Thonet must be considered a star designer and star industrialist as well. There can only be a few examples of industrialist and designers at the scale Thonet achieved; like Bell telephones named after Alexander Graham Bell, and Ford cars after Henry Ford, Michael Thonet had a vast design and manufacturing company named after him. With Giedion in mind who noted that ‘the elimination of the complicated handicraft marks the beginning of high mechanization’ there is no reference to the Thonet No.14 chair as an outcome of design and the processes, perhaps collaboratively, that took place[59].  He did however remark that ‘these simple beechwood chairs offered what they were seeking: form purified by serial production’[60].  

The Thonet No.14 chair is vital for an understanding of modern contemporary furniture according to C. Wilk, a decisive moment in functionalism[61]. The start of functionalism in furniture has been noted by a series of commentators as relating to Thonet. Michael Thonet’s steam bent furniture, of which the Thonet No.14 chair was such a prominent item in the canon, formed a transition from which the heavy ornamentation of the nineteenth century British furniture and the slightly less ornate central European Biedermeier was exposed and laid bare.

J Morley says ‘moralistic pluralism’ was inherent within the ‘dogmatic’ stylisation out of which Functionalism was built and which was the precursor of modernism[62].   This would not allow for the historical explanation of the Thonet No. 14 chair for which Giedion would wish. 

Pevsner’s cogent view, that the history of design is recorded though key people and manufacturing firms, as seen by the work of a star designer or architect, holds good here. Michael Thonet was not the first star designer, for example Thomas Chippendale (1718-1789) and Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) precede him, but it is his work as a designer and an industrialist for the volume distribution and dissemination of his work that makes him important. Here Giedion is interested in the ‘web of relationships’[63] which are built around a product. It is never quite known who contributed what to the Thonet No.14 chair, though Michael Thonet takes overall accreditation for the chair’s design. There were a lot of competitors in the bentwood industry so commercial considerations might have always prevented transparent understanding and a true examination of the ‘anonymous contributors’[64]. 

From the 1930s onwards Pevsner mapped the path of nineteenth century modernism,  giving prominence to Michael Thonet’s inventions in bentwood furniture, as well as Christopher Dresser with his Japanese or Persian-inspired metal work and ceramics.  Both Thonet and Dresser removed the historicism of their masterpieces with the pared-down functional forms they created[65].   Pevsner praised small things of everyday use, such as Voysey’s toast rack and cruet set.[66]

Rayner Banham (1922-1988) in 1955 when defining Modernism remarked that it is about ‘honesty in structure and material’, which is redolently evident in the Thonet No.14 Chair[67]. According to S. Anthony ‘By the 1920s, modern designers began to embrace new technologies and the possibility of mass production; the aesthetic of the machine then became a central theme in modernism. Two figures in particular promoted the language of industry: Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier.’[68]

Louis Sullivan stated in 1896 ‘Form ever follows function’; perhaps just as Modernism follows Functionalism[69]. Walter Gropius, who instigated the Bauhaus School in Germany, said in 1925 of Functionalism that ‘fitness for purpose = beauty’ which would describe the Thonet No.14 Chair that shows beauty through its structure[70].

The Thonet No.14 chair was already minimal compared to the Biedermeier furniture that was so prevalent in Central Europe at the time and in which Thonet had originally specialised. In a way the Thonet No.14 chair caught a populist rift of repurposing design and architecture to be fit for the new age, stripped of attachments and superfluous decorative meanings, taken back to expose beauty from the functional bare essentials of the construction. Architect Philip Johnson when commentating on functionalism mentioned "Today industrial design is functionally motivated and follows the same principles as modern architecture: machine-like simplicity, smoothness of surface, avoidance of ornament.... It is perhaps the most fundamental contrast between the two periods of design that in 1900 the Decorative Arts possessed..."[71]

Will Holman said that in the 1920s many modernist architects embraced the chair which exemplified the “machine aesthetic” including Marcel Breuer, Mart Starm, Adolf Loos, Poul Henningsen and Le Corbusier[72]. The chair’s appraisal as a modernis04/t artefact in the 1920s elevated the No. 14 chair’s design out of Victoriana and re-contextualised it for contemporary markets. Gafijczuk describes the desired ‘psychological modernity’ of the Thonet No.14 chair[73].   

In the 1920s the design of the modern chair became an allegory of modernism, which might be extended to the Thonet No.14 chair[74]. Many designers and architects diversified into designing tubular steel furniture including Le Corbusier. For many architects the second most important architectonic form after a building is an item of furniture.  There was a direct link between architectural form and furniture explored by many functionalist and modernist architects and designers of that time. Le Corbusier’s appraisal of modernist forms found in the Thonet bentwood furniture might be for several reasons, one of which is his consideration of the company for whom he designed. Le Corbusier was forthright about many things; when it came to his artistic sensibility he was known not to compromise his beliefs, therefore it was most probably a judgment made around stylisation. Le Corbusier liked Thonet bentwood furniture and promoted it as such. W. Curtis commented that Le Corbusier created a ‘synthesis of abstract ideas’ and a ‘new architectural vocabulary’ into which he positioned the Thonet No.14 chair[75].

Le Corbusier could promote the chair but he had an advantage over other commentators that not only was his written work rated very highly, but he also was a specifier and his buildings were filled with Thonet furniture including the Thonet No.14 chair for the architectural world and many others to view. 

Adolf Loos predominantly used Thonet bentwood chairs after completing the Museum Café in 1899 in Vienna. He adapted a Thonet No.14 chair into the Loos Chair, illustration 19. Moos states that Loos and Le Corbusier had the same taste in bentwood furniture but according to Loos in 1925, Le Corbusier specified the wrong Thonet model for his ‘Intérieurs’, the 209 model which Loos jokingly thought was the most uncomfortable of the whole Thonet series.[76]

18) Le Corbusier interior: living room of Le Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau 1925[77]. Thonet chairs were used.  Reconstruction in the Museum fur Gestaltung, Zurich 1987. 

19) The Loos chairs designed for the Museum Café, Vienna appear to be derived from Thonet’s No.14 chair and were made by the Thonet Company,[78]

 20) This photo by Christina Römer was the winning entry from Thonet GmbH’s photography competition to celebrate the 150th year of the Thonet No.14 (now No.214) chair [79]. The online design magazine Designboom, published the photograph by Römer in 2009 having received a press release from Thonet GmbH.

Max Donnelly of the V&A Furniture department suggested that around a significant moment in an important commercial artefact many press releases are sent out.

Stephen Bayley, the lauded British design commentator, wrote in The Guardian on 29 August 2009 that he is of the persuasion that there is no point designing new chairs, ‘why bother’ when the ‘greatest chair of all time exists’ as the Thonet No.14 chair[80].

Stephen Bayley is perhaps being flamboyant when writing a punchy statement about the ‘Commercial chair’, ‘Bistro chair’, Viennese chair or the Coffee Shop chair as the Thonet No.14 chair is also known[81]. Bayley is famous for making statements with aplomb and flair. Bayley’s has a reputation as one of the most important British design writers and critics. Since the early 1980s he has been involved with design and, together with design doyen Terence Conrad, helped found the London Design Museum.

Bayley may well have received a press release issued by Thonet GmbH to inform the press of the chair’s anniversary.  Bayley’s article, as others from that period of time, is celebratory and contains the key facts about the chair. The Bayley article, This Chair Still Has Legs, is based on an additional point, advance publicity of Thonet GmbH’s ongoing collaboration with the Japanese firm Muji to create a reworking of the No.14 chair.

As other such articles, Stephen Bayley’s article in The Guardian can perhaps to be viewed as publicity for Thonet and the Thonet No.14 chair and drawing attention to the Muji reinterpretation of that chair by James Irvine (creative director of Thonet) illustration 21.  Bayley’s article is perhaps symptomatic of the milieu of design homages of that time towards the Thonet No.14 Chair.

21) The new chair designed by James Irvine takes inspiration from Thonet’s No.14 chair on the right[83]. Frist shown to the press in the Tokyo Design Festival, the Muji chair is manufactured by Thonet and has ‘Muji by Thonet’ stamped on it.[84] 

Icon Magazine and Blueprint Magazine reported from a slightly different angle the launch of Muji’s reinterpretation of the Thonet No.14 chair, both magazines going to press in the same month as the Bayley article. The writing in each magazine is focused on the product launch of the new Thonet No.14 chair for Muji and the accompanying tubular steel desk design by Grcic based on Mart Stam’s and Marcel Breuer’s work for the company in the 1920s[85]. The 150th anniversary for the Thonet No.14 chair is not celebrated perhaps reflecting the professional stance of the two magazines which wish to celebrate the new.

Design journalist Alice Rawsthorn is a widely respected British commentator in the field of design with a column in The New York Times. Her learned approach is reflected in her article in which she makes several assertions as well as quoting designers. Her article written on 7 November 2008 in The New York Times, syndicated on the same day in the New York Herald,  ‘No.14: the chair that has seated Millions’ and might be in response to a Thonet GmbH press release. Rawsthorn alludes to the 150th celebrations of the chair.

Rawsthorn stated that this chair has ‘seated more people than any other chair in history’. 

There has also been so many unlicensed duplicates that millions more people will have sat on one, Illustration 17.  It is impossible, something that Rawsthorn alluded to, ever to do the maths correctly about the usage of this chair. As the “commercial chair” The Thonet No.14 chair was widely used in public places, so increasing the potential number of people who have used this chair.

22) Thonet No.14 chair replicas made in the Far East, selling for a fraction of the current price in the UK of a Thonet chair.[86]

As the Thonet No.14 chair has a quotidian presence in parts of the world for many, the epitome of a chair would be the No.14 chair. 

Alice Rawsthorn said the Thonet No.14 chair is attractive, inexpensive and appealed from ‘aristocrats to school teachers’, which would mean that there is a vast demographic of people who would buy the chair and provide positive appraisal from many areas of society[87].

Actually there would be at times a total spectrum of the use of the chair throughout society in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and beyond. The second hand price of this chair must have been low allowing for many to be able to purchases this item. The Thonet No.14 chair has a ubiquitous presence permeating all walks and demographics of society.

Perhaps it is the universality of the chair on which Rawsthorn comments, which is partly functionalist and modernist with aspects of the chair appealing to Le Corbusier’s sentiments[88]. The Thonet No.14 chair which has an unornamented modernist look did fall into a wider demographic of users partly based on its plain, functional and timeless appearance.

Bayley’s statement that the Thonet No.14 chair is the best chair ever made would reflect in the wide demographic that Rawsthorn alludes to.  The chair’s diffusion within society in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was vast, may have helped contribute towards the Thonet No.14 chair being the best chair ever made in the eyes of Bayley.

Alison Rawsthorn’s observations are that the No.14 chair follows the entire self-contained integral ‘designated functions’ that all ‘well designed objects must do’. Her assertion is that the ‘chair looks and feels great’. Also Rawsthorn comments on the ‘startling innovation’ of the Thonet No.14 chair. These aspects of Rawsthorn’s analysis of the Thonet No.14 chair point to condensed commendations that are key to why the Thonet No.14 chair has been such a success[89].

Rawsthorn in her article quotes praise for the Thonet No.14 Chair from the German designer Konstantin Grcic, ‘It’s one of the most beautiful chairs there is, and exactly the right weight. When you pick it up, it feels perfect. That’s an important aspect of the design that’s often overlooked.’  Later Rawsthorn also quotes British design Jasper Morrison who adds more praise on to the Thonet No.14 chair, ‘It has the freshness of a new product, because it has never been bettered.’

These two highly respected contemporary designers, Grcic and Morrison have symptomatic adulations towards the Thonet No.14 chair. The Thonet No.14 chair is of such fundamental design importance that the Boppard Thonet Museum comments that the current etymological way that we use the word ‘design’ was only brought into existence with the Thonet 14 chair[90].

There is great similarity between Rawsthorn’s and Bayley’s articles: from different approaches they are praising the same chair. Both articles are factual and informative about aspects of the chair; however it is Bayley’s contention that the chair is the best chair ever made, while in Rawsthorn article she lets design practitioners articulate that.[91]

What is of key interest to design historians is that while the Thonet No.14 chair dates back to 1859, the chair has a contemporary story as it is still being produced. Design commentators writing around the time of the 150th anniversary of the Thonet No.14 chair have mentioned that the chair has been unceasingly appraised over the years; this is because the Thonet No.14 chair has become a timeless classic[92]. ‘Timeless’ emanates from the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, as described by furniture scholar J Morley.[93] 

The Thonet No.14 chair definitely deserves to fit into a canon of furniture that is called timeless or classic and the chair is to be found in many anthologies of design as an exemplar of good design that not only has intrinsic design merits but also is influential in the development of design as a subject. Lessons throughout the design industry have been learnt from its production and distribution to the aesthetic elegance of this mass produced artefact. 

The chair was created by blending traditional cabinet making craft skillsets, with the then newly industrialised design methodologies. This blend of craft and industrial processes should be an example for aspiring designers to study as without craft there is no beauty in a product and without industrialised process there is limited ability to volume produce that product. Michael Thonet was well-honed in his ability to master craft and then employ the latest factory processes.  He is one of the first cult industrial designers.

To the layman the Thonet No.14 chair has numerous environmental settings, often well-advertised in cafés with happy diners and drinkers using them over generations. What these diners are unaware of is the critical reframing of the chair from being merely a chair to being an icon of the modern movement; to them it is a chair redolent of a Viennese café or other daily settings, Illustration 23). The critical reappraisal into modernism may well have had positive effects that are felt today in the marketing of the chair, though many people just see the Thonet No.14 chair as a chair without being aware of the gloss of contextualisation into the Modern Movement.  The Thonet No.14 chair is redolent of symbolism, elegance and history; it embodies technology into modern culture[94].

23)  Cartoon featuring Chair no 14 in Punch of 29 June 1889.[95] 

[95] Ole Bang ‘Thonet and England’ The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present no 11 pps27-31 p31​​​​​​​

24) This year’s Milan furniture show where Thonet exhibited. The Thonet No.14 (214) chair is on the far left of this cutting edge show. The Thonet 209 chair that Le Corbusier also liked is in the middle of the chair images. An air of modernism can be seen in the forms of these chairs[96].   

As the Thonet No.14 chair has stayed in production, perhaps the iterations of the Thonet No.14 design are to be observed, not in anonymous prototyping that Giedion commented on, but as design development afterwards in different modules relating to advancements of the Thonet No.14 chair into new products like Le Corbusier’s favourite the Thonet No.209 chair. The design change is perhaps seen in the chair’s diachronic iterations in the models before and after the landmark Thonet No.14 chair.

Due to the importance of the Thonet No. 14 chair, commentators like Bayley and Rawsthorn would naturally need to discuss it as it is one of the most important items in a panoply of designed objects as shown by sales figures alone, therefore the Thonet No.14 chair has to be reported on and covered by serious design commentators as one of the most important items in the design oeuvre. It might even be obligatory for commentators like Rawsthorn and Bayley to write about this chair at some point as they are educators.

The public might recognise the Thonet No.14 chair as just a familiar wooden chair but it has far more resonance with our lives and histories. The Thonet chair has had many critical appraisals, all only adding to the chair’s importance and prominence in the history of design.  The consensus of commentators is that Thonet No. 14 chair is one of the most important mass produced artefacts ever, though it is almost overlooked due to its ubiquity.

The Thonet No.14 chair demonstrates desirability, innovation and responsive manufacturing whereas for the consumer perhaps it is the reductionist aesthetics, functionality and initial affordability that are of prime importance[97]. No other mass produced item of furniture has had such longevity of nonstop manufacturing or appreciation by the public as well as by the design industry. 

                                 

Agerman, Johanna, ‘Muji and Thonet’ Icon, London, August, 2009

Anderson, Stanford ‘The Fiction of Function’ Assemblage no.2 Feb 1987

Bang, Ole ‘Thonet and England’ The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present, no 11

Banham, Reynar, New Brutalism, October, vol. 136, MIT press, 2011

Banham, Rayner, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age London, Architectural Press, 1960

Bayley, Stephen ‘This chair has still got legs’, The Guardian, Sunday 23 August 2009

Becker Dr Bettina, ‘Thonet- A modern design institution’, Goethe Institute, published 3 March, 2016

Benton, Charlotte, ‘Le Corbusier: Furniture and the Interior’, Journal of Design History Society, vol 3 2/3 (1990)  

Blueprint Magazine, London, August 2009

Bijker, Wiebe E, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Towards a Theory of Sociotechnical Change, Cambridge, Mass., MIT, 1995

Bürdek, B, Design: ‘History, Theory and Practice of Product Design’, Birkhäuser GmbH; 1st English edition 8, April 2005

Byars, Mel, The Design Encyclopedia, London/New York, Lawrence King Publishing/The Museum of Modern Art, 2004

Dry, Graham, ‘Munich, Joseph Hoffmann and his Circle. Furniture 1900-30’ The Burlington Magazine, Vol, 123, No.937 (April 1981)

Decorative Arts at the World’s fairs: 1850-1900, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Winter 1998-1999)

Ettema, Michael ‘Technical Innovation and Design Economics in Furniture Manufacture’ Winterthur Portfolio Vol 16 No 2/3 (summer-autumn 1981)  

Gafijczuk, Dariusz, ‘Bending Modernity: chairs, Psychanalysis and the rest of Culture’, Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 22 4 Dec, 2009

Gary, Vic, review ‘Curtis, William, Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms’, Leonardo Vol 20 no 3 (1987)

Giedion, Siegfried, Mechanization Takes Command: a Contribution to Anonymous History, New York, Oxford University Press, 1948

Gropius, Walter, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus

History: the Architecture of the 1920s and 1930s (summer, 1983)

Holman, Will: Guerrilla Furniture Design: How to Build Lean, Modern Furniture with Salvaged Materials:  Storey Publishing, LLC, 2015

Hounshell, David A, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932  Baltimore and London, The John Hopkins University Press, 1984

Kemer, Don C ‘David Alling's Chair Manufactory: Craft Industrialization in Newark, New Jersey’, Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 1987)

 Kinchin, Juliet, ‘Modernity and Tradition in Hungarian Furniture, 1900-1938: Three Generations’ The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, Vol. 24, Design, Culture, Identity: The Wolfsonian Collection (2002),

 Kyriazidou, Ekaterini, and Pesendorfer, Martin, ‘Viennese Chairs: A Case Study for Modern Industrialization’, Journal of Economic History Vol.59 No.1 (March 1999)  

Le Corbusier, Almanach d’Architecture Moderne Paris, Les Editions G. Crès, 1925  (Collection de “L’Esprit Nouveau”)

Le Corbusier, intro Cohen, Jean-Louis, trans. Goodman, John, Toward An Architecture, Los Angeles, Getty Publications, 2007

Loos, Adolf  ed. Opel, Adolf translated by Michael Mitchel  Ornament and Crime, Selected Essays Riverside, Calif; Ariadne Press, 1998  ch 21 A Review of Applied Arts 1 (1898)

Lovell, S, Icon 066, 2008, Dec,

McLeod, Mary, ‘“Architecture or Revolution”: Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change’, Art Journal, Vol 43, No 2, (Summer 1983)

Morley J, Furniture, The Western Tradition, History, Style, Design, Thames & Hudson, London, 1999
Mussari, Mark, DANISH Modern: Between Art & Design. Bloomsbury, 2016

Muthesius, Stefan, ‘'We Do Not Understand What Is Meant by a "Company" Designing': Design versus Commerce in Late Nineteenth-Century English Furnishing’ Journal of Design History, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1992)

Ostergard, Derek E, Ed, Bent wood and metal furniture 1850-1946  New York, University of Washington Press with the American Federation of Arts, 1987

Pevsner, Nikolaus, Pioneers of the Modern Movement, Faber and Faber, London 1936

Putman, Tim ‘The Theory of Machine Design in the Second Industrial Age’ Journal of Design History, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1988),

Rawsthorn, Alice, ‘No.14 The chair that has seated millions’, The New York Times, November 7, 2008,

Rawsthorn, Alice, ‘No.14: The chair that has seated millions’, International Herald Tribune, 7 November 2008,

Riccini, Raimonda, ‘Notes on the History of Industrial Design’, Design Issues, Vol 14, No3 (Autumn 1998) pp 43-64 

Rüegg, Arthur, in collaboration with Spechtenhauser, Klaus, Le Corbusier: Furniture and Interiors 1905-1965,  Zurich, Scheidegger & Spiess, 2012

Skemer, Don C. David Alling’s Chair Manufactory: Craft Industrialization in Newark, New Jersey. 1801-1854’ Winterthur Portfolio, Vol 22, No (Spring 1987)

‘The European connection’, The journal of decorative arts 1850 to the present day, number 11, 1987

Sullivan, Louis H. "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered". Lippincott's Magazine (March 1896):

Taylor, Patrick, Thonet Bentwood Chair, 2005,

Wilk, Christopher, Thonet:150 years of Furniture,  New York, Barron's Educational Series Inc., (Jan. 1981)  

Von Moos, Stanislaus, and (translated by) Sobiesky, Margaret, ‘Le Corbusier and Loos’, Assemblage, No. 4 (Oct., 1987)

Von Vegesack, Alexander, ‘Mass Production Chair Man’, Independent, Sunday 1, December 1996.

Von Vegesack, Alexander, Thonet, Classic Furniture in Bentwood and Tubular Steel, London, Hazar Publishing, 1996
Witold, Rybczynski, ‘The Henry Ford of Chairs’, work in progress P6 2016,  
Zucker, Paul, ‘The paradox of Architectural Theories at the Beginning of the “Modern Movement’’ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol 10, No.3 (Oct 1951)

Web