Mid-century modern furniture design

The period from the end of World War II to the early 1960s brought a period of optimism and prosperity to the United States. John F. Kennedy becomes president, a man flies into space, and it seemed like a time when anything was possible. Gio Ponti and Carlo di Carli added sensuality to furniture not seen since the heyday of Art Nouveau. Planned obsolescence seemed like a good idea and disposable furniture was all the rage. Joe Colombo built a chair out of cylinders covered in polyurethane foam that could be taken apart and put in a duffel bag. Wendell Castle made a white molded plastic chair that looks like a sandcastle with only a depression in the center to sit on.

The new plastics allowed furniture to be molded into every imaginable and unimaginable shape. Places like the Superstudio and Archizoom overreacted by doing what they called Anti-design … furniture uncomfortable to use and ugly to look at.

But for most designers, form followed function and they expanded into the minimalist look of the modernists. To the Japanese influence of simple structures, they added bold colors, stretch fabrics, and molded plywood. The use of widely versatile aluminum-influenced furniture design. As leisure became a more important part of American culture, designers began creating chairs designed to stoop. Informality ruled and lines were stretched and moved in organic forms only available from new materials.

Like the seminal work of Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson of the Herman Miller furniture company took off with a style that demanded “durability, unity, integrity, and inevitability.” The United States, because it was able to recover so quickly from the ravages of World War II, led the way.

Likewise, the Scandinavian countries were much less affected by the war and were therefore able to start production much faster than the rest of Europe. Hans Wegner designed his Model No. JH 501 chair which became so popular that it was simply called The Chair. House Beautiful declared it the most beautiful chair in the world. It was the chair that was used to sit in the televised debate between JFK and Richard Nixon.

One of the most interesting aspects of Scandinavian furniture was the use of teak. Native to the Pacific Rim countries, large military exercises cleared large sections of forest in Thailand and the Philippines, making teak abundant and cheap. Finn Juhl was a master at shaping teak into free-form furniture.

Other fashion items were the Arne Jacobsen armchair, with its polyurethane foam shell upholstered in leather and supported on copper-clad tubular legs. His 3107 chair was so popular that 6 million had been sold by the end of the 20th century.

One of the strangest pieces of the time was the UP5 chair by Gaetano Pesce. It was made of high-density polyurethane foam and lined with stretch nylon. It was then placed in a vacuum chamber and shrunk to 10 percent of its original size and packaged between two heat-sealed plastic sheets. When you got home and opened the bag, the air would leak back in and the chair would regain its full size and shape.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *