Karl Mang - Das Haus Thonet - 1969

The Thonet House

Wonderful book about the history of "Das Haus Thonet".

Vienna, Frankenberg an der Eder, 1969, square 4to format (28 x 29 cm), paperback with colored cover, 54 pages, fully illustrated.

Excellent condition, apart from small damages to the front and back cover. Not distracting. (see photos)

Will be carefully packed with tracking and insured shipping.

Good luck with the bidding!!

"Michael Thonet (Boppard, July 2, 1796 – Vienna, March 3, 1871) was a German-Austrian furniture maker and industrialist and is worldwide regarded as one of the greatest pioneers in furniture design.
Beginnings in Boppard
Michael Thonet, the son of a leather worker, learned the craft of joinery and settled in 1819 as an independent furniture maker in his hometown. He made chairs, settees, and beds in a conventional Biedermeier style, but sought means to produce faster and cheaper and with less material waste.
Around 1830 he developed a method to make furniture from bent wood by cooking thin wooden laths in glue until they became flexible. Bundles of these laths he then pressed with a mold into shape, to finally veneer them with thin sheets of wood.
The "Bopparder chairs" he made were classical in form and not different from those of his contemporaries, but Michael Thonet had early industrial ambitions: he worked on stock rather than only to order; he bought a mill to produce his own glue; and he applied for patents on his method of bending wood with the intention of selling licenses to other furniture makers.
However, fearing imitation and leaks, he remained vague in his patent application, which led to the refusal of his request because his working method would not be considered sufficiently novel. Michael Thonet was left with debts.
In 1841 he exhibited his creations at an industrial fair in Koblenz, where they were noticed by the Austrian chancellor Klemens von Metternich. Metternich advised him to move to Vienna, because Thonet would remain poor in Boppard, while in a world city like Vienna he might make a fortune.
Viennese period.
A year later Thonet’s possessions in Boppard, including his stock, were publicly sold under order of his creditors, after which Michael Thonet moved to Vienna. Owing to guild regulations, he could not establish himself independently there and had to work for established furniture makers. Through his connection with Metternich he managed to obtain an Austrian patent in 1842 for his method of bending wood. Nevertheless, during that period he mainly worked on parquet floors for the Liechtenstein city palace.
In 1849 he could finally establish himself independently again, and he improved his method of bending wood by bending bundles of wooden rods instead of thin laths. In 1849 Thonet developed the chair No. 4, with which Café Daum in Vienna was furnished. Notably, the design of Thonet’s chairs now followed logically from the technique used, rather than the other way around.
His participation in the 1851 World Exhibition at Crystal Palace (London) provided an international breakthrough. In the following years Thonet took part in many national and international exhibitions and won numerous prizes and medals. In 1853 he converted his Vienna workshop into the company Gebrüder Thonet, registered in the names of his five sons, though he kept firm control of leadership.

The success: the factories
Thonet chair Model No. 14, the Vienna coffee-house chair
He continuously improved his production methods and opened a factory in Koritschan in 1856, a town in Moravia with good rail connections. It lay amid beech forests that supplied the best raw material for his chair production. In this new factory wood was no longer cooked in glue but bent after hours of steaming. As a result, in 1859 he finally succeeded in bending solid wood rods, paving the way for mass furniture production. In Koritschan models of chairs were also developed that could be assembled with a simple connection using screws and were shipped in parts to the consumer.
In 1859 he produced chair No. 14, also known as the Vienna coffee-house chair, which became the quintessential example of a successful industrial product: more than 50 million were made. In its simplest version this chair consisted of only 6 wooden pieces, six screws, and two nuts. This made the chair incredibly light and extremely cheap. When Thonet’s last patent expired in 1869, chair No. 14 was endlessly copied by countless competitors.
Rocking chair No. 1, Brooklyn Museum, New York
In 1860 he made rocking chair No. 1. Two years later it was shown at the London World’s Fair. After the Koritschan factory, Michael Thonet also opened factories in Bistritz (1861), Groß-Ugrócz (1865), and Wsetin (1868), with numerous branches in places with plenty of beech forests. By having factories in several countries, he also avoided customs duties on his products. He eventually employed 6,000 workers and built around each factory a town with its own social facilities to attract the necessary labor. He became the largest furniture manufacturer ever, and his range included not only bentwood chairs but also tables, beds, flower boxes, music stands, and coat racks, up to tennis rackets. At their peak, the factories produced 4,000 furniture pieces per day.
His companies were autonomously organized: he owned the beech forests for raw material, the workshops, the machines, and the workers’ houses, and finally had his own branches for sales in all major European cities and in the United States. He numbered his models and had catalogs printed in several languages with images and prices for each product.
After his death, the factory was continued by his five sons, who besides their own designs also attracted designers such as Josef Hoffmann, Otto Wagner, Gustav Siegel, and Adolf Loos.
From 1930 the factory also produced metal tubular furniture, with designs by Mart Stam, Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Gerrit Rietveld.