MCM MASTERS | PIECES AND SOURCE GUIDE

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SWITZERLAND (1887–1965)

Widely considered one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, Le Corbusier (born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris) is credited with changing the face of urban architecture, bringing it into the technological age. Connecting architecture with revolution, his legacy demonstrates a strong, if utopian, sense of purpose to meet the needs of a democratic society dominated by the machine. “Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city,” he said in 1923.

Born in Switzerland, Le Corbusier was encouraged by a teacher to take up architecture. He built his first house at the age of 18 for a member of his school’s teaching staff. In 1908, he went to Paris and began to practice with Auguste Perret, an architect known for his pioneering use of concrete and reinforced steel. Moving to Berlin, Le Corbusier worked with Peter Behrens, who taught him about industrial processes and machine design. In 1917, he returned to Paris, where he met post-Cubist Amédée Ozenfant and developed Purism, a new concept of painting. In 1920, still in Paris, he adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier.

Paradoxically, Le Corbusier combined a passion for classical Greek architecture and an attraction to the modern machine. He published his ideas in a book entitled Vers une Architecture, in which he refers to the house as a “machine for living,” an industrial product that should include functional furniture or “equipment de l’habitation.” In this spirit, Le Corbusier co-designed a system of furniture with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand. The tubular steel furniture – including the famous LC4 Chaise Longue and LC2 and LC3 seating collections – projected a new rationalist aesthetic that came to epitomize the International Style.

Corbusier was both credited with and criticized for his reinvention of the modern urban skyline – notably, the buildings he pioneered in Paris’ banlieues, which were considered efficient but austere. Though Le Corbusier’s illustrious career came to an abrupt end in 1965 when he drowned while swimming in the Mediterranean Sea off Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in France, his influence is undisputed.

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DENMARK (1902–1971)

Arne Jacobsen bought a plywood chair designed by Charles Eames and installed it in his own studio, where it inspired one of the most commercially successful chair models in design history. The three-legged Ant Chair (1951) sold in the millions and is considered a classic today. It consists of two simple elements: tubular steel legs and a springy seat and back formed out of a continuous piece of plywood in a range of vivid colors.

Jacobsen began training as a mason before studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, where he won a silver medal for a chair that was then exhibited at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. Influenced by Le Corbusier, Gunnar Asplund and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Jacobsen embraced a functionalist approach from the outset. He was among the first to introduce modernist ideas to Denmark and create industrial furniture that built on the country’s craft-based design heritage.

First among Jacobsen’s important architectural commissions was the Bellavista housing project in Copenhagen (1930-1934). His best-known and most fully integrated works are the SAS Air Terminal and the Royal Hotel Copenhagen, for which Jacobsen designed every detail, from sculptural furnishings such as his elegant Swan and Egg Chairs (1957-1958) to textiles, lighting, ashtrays and cutlery.

During the 1960s, Jacobsen’s most important work was a unified architectural and interior design scheme for St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, which, like his earlier work for the Royal Hotel, involved the design of site-specific furniture. Jacobsen’s work remains appealing and fresh today, combining free-form sculptural shapes with the traditional attributes of Scandinavian design, material and structural integrity.

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HUNGARY (1902–1981)

Sparked by bicycle handlebars, Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel chairs were a daring departure from traditional wood furniture. “Mass production,” Breuer said, “made me interested in polished metal, in shiny and impeccable lines in space, as new components of our interiors. I considered such polished and curved lines not only symbolic of our modern technology but actually to be technology.”

Drawing upon this image of “shiny and impeccable lines in space,” in 1925 Breuer designed his famous Wassily Chair, which was later named after Wassily Kandinsky, a former Bauhaus colleague. Breuer’s range of tubular metal furniture had singular advantages: affordability, simplicity and an inherent resilience. He considered his designs essential for modern living.

Breuer’s next breakthrough was his cantilevered chair. While Mart Stam and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had created cantilevered chairs using steel tubes, they were rigid and awkward. Breuer used unreinforced steel tubing, creating a free-swinging chair that approached his de-materialist ideal of “sitting on columns of air.” The cantilevered chair was his greatest commercial success, and its design continued to evolve, the frame becoming lighter, the seat and back more pliant and the lines softer.

In 1928 Breuer left the Bauhaus and moved to Berlin. He relocated to England in 1935, when the Nazis made it impossible for anyone who had been a part of the Bauhaus – a “hotbed of Bolshevism” – to practice architecture. In 1937, he began to collaborate with Walter Gropius in the Boston area and joined Harvard as a professor. Breuer later moved to New York in 1946 to found his own architectural firm, with concrete becoming his medium of choice, exemplified by his 1964 design of the Whitney Museum of American Art, now known as The Met Breuer.

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FINLAND (1910–1961)

“The purpose of architecture is to shelter and enhance man’s life on earth and to fulfill his belief in the nobility of his existence,” said Eero Saarinen in 1959. Saarinen’s architectural legacy communicates this sentiment of giddy potential and unfettered optimism in post-war America. Iconic projects like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Washington D.C.’s Dulles International Airport Terminal and the Kresge Auditorium on MIT’s campus express his groundbreaking brand of midcentury modernism.

Born in Finland to famed architect Eliel Saarinen and textile designer Loja Saarinen, Eero immigrated with his family to the United States in 1923. Settling in Michigan, Eliel co-founded the Cranbrook Academy of Art and designed most of the buildings for the campus – now a National Historic Landmark – while the young Eero worked alongside his father as a student apprentice. It was at Cranbrook that Eero met Charles Eames, beginning their lifelong collaboration.

In 1934, Saarinen graduated from the School of Architecture at Yale University. As his career flourished, he was criticized for changing his style depending on his client’s needs and desires. The architect, however, saw his clients as “co-creators” and was dedicated to pushing the established boundaries of modernism, what he called the ”measly ABC.” Clients understood this creative potential. After his father’s death in 1950, Saarinen became principal partner of Saarinen & Associates, and the business thrived – landing him on the cover of Time magazine in 1956. Poised at the center of America’s post-war expansion, Saarinen created a visual vocabulary for both corporate and college campuses, including headquarters for John Deere, IBM and CBS, and buildings for Vassar College, MIT and his alma mater, Yale.

Saarinen didn’t ignore the smaller sculptural pieces needed to furnish his ambitious projects. Though he started designing furniture in his teens, it wasn’t until he and Charles Eames won first prize in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Organic Design in Home Furnishings” competition in 1940 that he was taken seriously as a furniture designer. Though their award-winning molded plywood chairs were never put into production, the acknowledgement launched the careers of both men – Eames going on to work for Herman Miller, while Saarinen partnered with his former Cranbrook associates, Hans and Florence Knoll. His Pedestal Table, Tulip™ Chair, Womb™ Chair and Executive Seating have all become easily recognizable icons of American modernism.

Saarinen’s illustrious career was cut short with his untimely death in 1961, at age 51, while having surgery for a brain tumor. (Coincidentally, his wife Aline would die from the same affliction, a decade later.) His partners at Saarinen & Associates, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, completed his 10 remaining projects. In 2002, Roche donated Saarinen’s papers and drawings to the Yale University Library, which created a renewed interest in Saarinen’s life and work, including the establishment of Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, an exhibition and archival project dedicated to preserving the midcentury master’s legacy.

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DENMARK (1914–2007)

Hans Wegner stands among designers Finn Juhl, Arne Jacobsen, Børge Mogensen, Poul Kjærholm and Verner Panton as a master of 20th-century Danish modernism. More specifically, he was instrumental in developing a body of work known as organic functionalism. His early training included both carpentry and architecture, and in the early 1940s he worked for Erik Møller and Arne Jacobsen designing furniture for the Aarhus City Hall, in Aarhus, Denmark, before establishing his own furniture studio. Until the 1960s, Wegner typically collaborated with cabinetmaker Johannes Hansen to realize his designs, most notably gracefully tapered and curved solid-wood chairs, often composites of wood and woven rattan or leather. He occasionally experimented with laminates, as in the Three-Legged Shell Chair (1963), or steel and oxhide, as in the Ox Chair (1960) for Erik Jørgensen. While he is best known for his chairs, Wegner has also created memorable cabinetry, desks, tables, beds and lighting.

The debut of the Peacock Chair (1947) at the Cabinetmakers’ Guild of Copenhagen was a turning point in Wegner’s career, and from then on his work was in demand. For years he was compelled to produce a new chair for the show each spring, designing such well-known pieces as the Folding Chair (1949), the Round Chair (1950) and the Flag Halyard Chair (1950), completing over 200 chairs in all. He frequently turned to traditional furniture for inspiration for his modern designs. The Chinese Chair (1944) draws on 17th-century Chinese seating, while the Peacock Chair, with its fanlike back, recalls the hoop form of the Windsor chair.

Over the years, Wegner perfected the design and production of his work, although the entire process remained lengthy. The Danish King, Frederick IX, waited two years for a four-legged Valet Chair (later versions had three legs) while Wegner tested the prototype at home. It is so-called because the hanger-shaped chair back is designed to keep a jacket wrinkle-free and the seat tilts up for use as a pants hanger, revealing a box for cuff links, keys and watches. Wegner’s preferred method of working was to start with a sketch from which he would make a 1:5-scale model and then a full-scale model. Before beginning production, each piece of furniture was drawn at full scale on a single sheet, with the drawings – two elevations and a top-down view – superimposed on one another.

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DENMARK (1916–2016)

Jens Risom is widely considered to be a pioneer in introducing Danish modern furniture to the United States through early work with the Knoll company and to a greater extent through his own company, which thrived in the 1950s and ’60s.

Risom emigrated from Denmark to the States in 1939 seeking an opportunity in furniture design but found that to be elusive. At 23, he had already attended business school, studied at Copenhagen’s School for Arts and Crafts and designed furniture for Kaare Klint and architect Ernst Kuhn.

His U.S. breakthrough came when he met Hans Knoll, a German immigrant whose family had been in the furniture trade back home. Knoll knew sales but not design, so he and Risom made a balanced team. Their first task was to tour the country to survey the landscape, visit with architects and generally assess the potential market for a line of modern furniture.

The result was Knoll’s first catalog, which contained a majority of furniture designed by Risom. Among his enduring pieces from that era is the Risom Lounge Chair, marked by distinctive and much-copied webbing made from surplus parachute straps, one of the few materials available during the scarcity of World War II. The chair is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Risom himself was drafted into the Army and served in the war under Gen. George Patton. Upon his return to the civilian world, he founded his own company, Jens Risom Design, on May 1, 1946, which he ran for 25 years. Throughout his life, Risom stayed true to the fundamental Danish approach to modernism, with its emphasis on traditional values and the human need for warmth, beauty and simplicity.