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JEWELRY TO JETS: ALUMINUM DESIGN SINCE THE 1850s
Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2000 by Sarah Nichols
In the late 1920s designers on both sides of the Atlantic were using aluminum in furniture in ways that exploited the material's specific properties. In France, Jacques Le Chevallier, who was primarily a stained-glass artist, capitalized on the metal's reflective qualities in an amazing array of architectonic aluminum table lights, designed between 1927 and 1930 and inspired by cubist principles (see cover and P1. II). [14] Reflectiveness was also important to Eileen Gray in her use of aluminum sheets to cover the back, sides, and most of the front of the freestanding cork cupboard shown in Plate X, which was made as a space divider between the main part of the bedroom and a small washing area in the house (called E.1027) Gray designed for herself and Jean Badovici at Roquebrune in southern France. When opened, using the aluminum scroll handle at the top, the cupboard's right-hand door provided more privacy in the washing area and another reflective surface in the bedroom, which along with the cupboard's alu minum back, must have created some interesting visual effects. [15] ray produced two other examples of this cupboard, for she intended to use the furniture she designed for E.l027 as prototypes for inexpensive versions to be sold in her Paris shop. Like other French furniture designers who used aluminum at this time, however, she never aimed at the mass market. Aluminum producers, on the other hand, hoped to change this attitude. In early 1933 the International Bureau for Applications of Aluminum announced the International Competition for the Best Seating in Aluminum in Paris. Designs were to be economical and suitable for mass production for use in ships, offices, hotels, cafes, and theaters. The competition brief stressed the importance of originality and of designing for aluminum's unique characteristics, especially its light weight. Participants from fourteen countries submitted 209 chair designs, 54 of which were executed in prototype. Two independent juries, one composed of industry representatives and the other convened under the auspices of the International Congress of Modern Architecture, both awarded first prize to Marcel Breuer, whose entry included prototypes for a stool, an office chair a side chair an armchair, and a chaise longue (Fig. 1). [16] Breuer, a graduate of and former teacher at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later Dessau, Germany had an edge over the other competition entrants because he had been working on designs for aluminum chairs before the competition was announced and was in negotiation with, among others, Embru-Werke, a Swiss company, to produce them. By 1934 Breuer's aluminum chairs were in full production and had already received substantial press coverage in both design and aluminum circles. Despite the fact that they were light, flexible, and comfortable, they never lived up to their early commercial promise in terms of mass sales. [17]
By 1938 Switzerland ranked sixth in the world in the production of aluminum, and the metal accounted for more than 5 percent of the country's exports. [18] Thus, it seems hardly surprising that some of Breuer's Swiss-made aluminum chairs appeared on the terraces and in other public spaces of the 1939 Swiss National Exhibition (Schweizerische Landesausstellung) in Zurich. In fact, the exhibition is remembered today principally for the chair chosen as its official indoor and outdoor seating, the so-called Landi chair (Pl. XV). Designed by Hans Coray, it has a continuous aluminum seat and back that is perforated for extra lightness and to allow rainwater to run off. Combining technologies from the aeronautical industry and the Swiss Federal Railway, [19] the chair typifies the transference of technologies from one arena to another that influenced aluminum design throughout the twentieth century It became an icon of aluminum and Swiss design, although the mass marketing of aluminum chairs in Europe had to wait u ntil after World War II.
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