Gustav Siegel (Designer)

Gustav Siegel (born January 21, 1880 in Vienna ; † January 24, 1970 in Vienna ) was an Austrian interior and furniture designer .

Life

Gustav Siegel learned the carpentry trade and completed the professional training school for carpenters in Vienna. In the years from 1897 to 1901 Siegel studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, where he was a student of the architect Josef Hoffmann from 1899 .

At Hoffmann's recommendation, Siegel was employed by the furniture factory Jacob & Josef Kohn as chief designer and designed a furniture group for the dining room and bedroom, which was presented at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900 .

Siegel based this design on an armchair with a low backrest from the end of the 18th century. With this idea he ushered in a new era in bentwood furniture design . The design should become the "pilot model" of the classic series. The design was varied and imitated several times, not only by Jacob & Josef Kohn, but also by their rival company, the Thonet brothers . Otto Wagner took up this design and used it for the interior of the dispatch office of the magazine " Die Zeit " and subsequently for the armchairs of the Vienna Post Savings Bank .

Siegel's design, bentwood furniture with square cross-sections, was something new for the time, as before that there was only bentwood with a round cross-section or squared timber with glued layers. This principle was quickly adopted by all designers and bentwood furniture was designed exclusively with angular cross-sections.

The efforts of the Kohn company, which had existed since 1849, were finally rewarded with success through Siegel's performance. In 1901 Jacob & Josef Kohn were able to present the equipment of an entire house made of bentwood furniture at the annual Christmas exhibition in the Austrian Museum for Art and Industry . All models came from the company's own workshop.

In addition to Kohn, Siegel also influenced designs by the Thonet company. Siegel remained employees of Mundus even after the merger of the companies Kohn and "Mundus AG" in 1914, and Thonet and Mundus in 1922.

After these changes, the Thonet Mundus Group looked in an international competition in 1929 for a key model made of bentwood that corresponded to the time. The jury consisted of architects such as Le Corbusier , Pierre Jeanneret , Gerrit Rietvield , Adolf Gustav Schneck , Bruno Paul and Gustav Siegel, who at the time was head of the Thonet-Mundus development office. The Vienna “Chair Festival”, however, had a lackluster outcome.

Gustav Siegel died, forgotten, in 1970 in Vienna (birth and death dates according to the registry office Vienna-Hietzing ).

literature

• Judith Miller: Furniture. The great encyclopedia . Dorling Kindersley, Starnberg 2006, ISBN 3-8310-0947-3 (English: Furniture .).
• Jiri Uhlir: From Viennese chair to architectural furniture: Jacob & Josef Kohn, Thonet and Mundus. Bentwood furniture from Secessionism to interwar modernism . Böhlau, Vienna 2009, ISBN 3-205-78375-1 .

Web links

• Gustav Siegel's biography