Armchair by Oswald Haerdtl for Thonet, 1950s

One of the most respected designer-architects of the interwar and postwar period, Oswald Haerdtl was born in Vienna in 1899. He is best known for his early expressions of modernist design, especially those that contributed to Vienna's famous Kaffeehaus culture, as well as for his collaborations with iconic Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann.

Haerdtl trained as an architect under Oskar Strnad and Josef Frank, graduating in 1921 with the Eitelberger Prize for academic achievement from the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 1922, Haerdtl took an assistant position with Hoffmann, who became his mentor and later his colleague as they collaborated on many different projects. Haerdtl notably worked with Hoffmann’s team at the Exposition Internationale des Art Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in 1925. While in Paris, he took the opportunity to visit the studios and see the works of his favorite modernists, including Le Corbusier, Jean Lurçat, and André Lurçat, and Fernand Léger.

Returning to Vienna, Haerdtl set up studio at the Werkbundsiedlung in Vienna, a residential project lead by his former teacher Josef Frank and other well known architects, which was intended to be an exemplar of modern living. There, he produced his first solo projects, including the design of several residential and office buildings. His designs were chosen to represent Austria in the world fairs in Brussels in 1935 and in Paris in 1937. In 1935, he also accepted a professorship in architecture from his former teacher Oskar Strnad at his alma mater.

Although criticized for employing Jewish contractors to produce his architectural and design projects following the Anschluss of Austria to Nazi Germany in 1938, Haerdtl continued to work at the university. He avoided military conscription in 1940 after appeals were made on his behalf and he was declared “indispensable” to the university. Still, his studio suffered from the war, so he opened offices in Krakow and Wroclaw, where he designed hotels, offices, and camouflage for industrial equipment.

A Viennese institution, the Kaffeehaus found renewed popularity in the 1950s, Haerdtl found a great deal of work creating café interiors, as well as menus, vases, cutlery, glassware, and tableware. His café chairs were produced by Thonet, which, although also made from bentwood, exhibited a more modern aesthetic than Thonet’s original No.14 Chair. Waitstaff uniforms—deemed an as essential element of the cafés' interior decoration— were often designed by Haerdtl’s wife, Carmela. Haerdtl's famous café interiors include the Café Prükel (1939, completely reconstructed in 1954), Arabia (1950-57), and Hotel Bristol (1948-55).

Haerdtl died suddenly in August 1959. He has since been the subject of two retrospective exhibitions, in 1978 and in 2000, both in Vienna. He was the recipient of many prizes and honors including the Golden Merit Medal of the Republic of Austria (1934 and 1937), the Austrian State Prize for Architecture (1937), and the City of Vienna Prize for Architecture (1948).

Thonet—the oldest surviving furniture company in the world—began its long life in 1819, when cabinetmaker Michael Thonet (1796-1871) established a furniture workshop in Boppard, Germany. A proponent of the Biedermeier style, he specialized in chairs, tables, and storage pieces characterized by clean lines, reduced ornamentation, and an emphasis on functionalist principles. By the 1830s, Thonet’s experiments in laminated and steam-bent wood furniture, like his famous Boppard Chair (1836), brought international acclaim. Thonet’s designs achieved a combination of lightness, durability, and comfort unknown in European furniture at the time.

A great fan of his work, Prince Metternich of Austria invited Thonet to present his designs to the Viennese court in 1842. Finding so much support there, Thonet opened a new company in Vienna in 1849. In 1853, he transferred his company to his sons, and Gebrüder Thonet was established.

Through the second half of the 19th century, Gebrüder Thonet designs grew increasingly popular with the cultural vanguard, especially among progressive design thinkers and tastemakers. One design in particular, the No. 14 Café Chair (ca. 1859), led the way to international success: the chair’s innovative bending technique was well suited to industrial production, and its rationalized, easily assembled structure allowed for efficient packing and shipping. In 1850, Anna Daum famously outfitted her fashionable Viennese café with No. 14 Chairs, and by the 1870s, Gebrüder Thonet had sales offices across Europe and the US. To date, more than 50 million No. 14 Chairs have been sold worldwide–not counting the untold pirated copies.

Iconic pieces from the traditional Gebrüder Thonet collection include Rocking Chair No. 1 (1860), No. 14 Café Chair (ca. 1859), Adolf Loos’s Café Museum Chair (1899), No. 209 Armchair (ca. 1900), Otto Wagner’s No. 247 Postal Savings Bank Chair (1904), and Josef Hoffmann’s No. 811 (1925). In the early years of the 20th century, Gebrüder Thonet also began producing designs in bent tubular steel by Bauhaus masters like Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Mart Stam.

In the aftermath of World War II, Thonet lost all of its production facilities in Eastern Europe, and the sales office at Vienna’s Stephansplatz had been destroyed. Between 1945 and 1953, Georg Thonet, the great-grandson of company founder Michael Thonet, led the rebuilding. Economic success returned quickly. In the ensuing decades, the company commissioned designs from many outstanding designers, such as Verner Panton, Pierre Paulin, Norman Foster, James Irvine, Piero Lissoni, and Stefan Diez. Classic Thonet pieces can be found in museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou and Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, and the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

In 1976 Thonet was divided into two separate German and Austrian companies, which remain independent of each other. Today, Thonet GmbH is headquartered in Frankenberg, Germany and continues to manufacture the original, bentwood and tubular steel designs alongside new pieces by contemporary, international architects and designers. Originally opened in 1861 by Thonet himself, the furniture factory TON (Továrna Ohýbaného Nábytku), which is located in what is known today as the Czech Republic, continues to manufacture Thonet designs. 

* All images courtesy of Thonet.de