Furniture program German workshops
The Deutsche Werkstätten (MDW) furniture program is modular assembly furniture . The system was presented to the public in 1967 and was produced in large numbers by Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau for over 24 years . It consisted of vertical side walls and shelves in white varnish and fronts in dark wood veneer. A design collective from the Institute for Furniture and Interior Design at the University of Industrial Design in Halle under the leadership of Rudolf Horn developed the MDW program.
The first comprehensive assembly furniture represents a high point of modularization in furniture design. It offers container furniture for living, sleeping, working, youth and entrance areas. A few individual parts of a strict grid system manufactured from chipboard in industrial mass production offered a wide range of variable composition options for self-assembly. The consumer is integrated into the design and production processes as a finalist.
"[...] the buyer is able to buy components that allow practically hundreds of variants. So there is no pre-designed overall shape of a piece of furniture or a living room. Rather, it is up to the customer to create the order he wants with the help of these components according to his ideas, but also according to the space available to him. "
The planned economy system of the GDR limited production to six of the twelve planned modules. The furniture trade presented complete bodies instead of individual parts; from 1974 only partially glued, pre-assembled furniture bodies were produced in Hellerau. At the same time, the wood veneer was replaced by wood decorative film. From 1976 the program was marketed slightly modified as MDW 80, and completely redesigned as MDW 90 in 1985. The programmatic clarity of the first draft became more and more diluted in the course of this period. The use as a monolithic wall unit corresponds little to the potential of the furniture range. Still, it was very popular. The professional world perceived the functional MDW program as a revolution.