MOBELBAU IN HOLZ, ROHR UND STAHL
Erich Dieckmann
Erich Dieckmann: MOBELBAU IN HOLZ, ROHR UND STAHL. Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann Verlag, 1931. First edition [Die Baübucher Bd. 11/ Dieckmann, Möbelbau]. Text in German. Quarto. Thick printed paper wrappers. 90 pp. 232 photographs and diagrams prepared by the author. Former owner inkstamp to front free endpaper. Cardboard wrappers lightly edgeworn and spotted. Textblock lightly thumbed with a couple of pencil marks to margins and a few leaves with trivial spotting to edges. A very good copy.
9 x 11.5 softcover book with 90 pages and 232 photographs and diagrams of Erich Dieckmann’s modern furniture designs in “wood, tube and steel.” The ubiquitous chair has long been the imperative challenge for some of the greatest architects and designers of the 20th century, from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to Charles and Ray Eames to Frank Gehry. Many of the most influential attempt to reinvent the chair were those made by Europeans associated with the Bauhaus school in Germany starting in the early 1920s. By combining bent metal with canvas, caning or leather, Bauhaus designers introduced chairs with lightness, strength and minimalism that echoed the 19th-century bentwood furniture of the Austrian and German Thonet company, even as they leapt into the industrial age.
The development of tubular steel furniture in the 1920s and 1930s is considered a milestone in the history of modern furniture. The clear, open and simple form of the furniture excellently matched the new objective architecture of the time and embodied an entirely new interior design style. Transparency, restraint and functionality characterise all tubular steel designs from that era. The most important “invention” was the cantilever chair, the flexing cantilever chair without back legs, which is one of the most important design innovations of the 20th century.
Dieckmann, along with his contemporaries Mart Stam (1899 – 1986) and Marcel Breuer (1902 – 1981) utilized standard gas pipe and standard pipe joint fittings to design furnishings that took advantage of modern industrial manufacturing capabilities. Unlike his contemporaires, Dieckmann managed to avoid the patent lawsuits that inevitably follow these seismic shifts in public taste and perception.
Erich Dieckmann (German, 1896 – 1944) was one of the preeminent furniture designers of the Bauhaus and, like Marcel Breuer, was experimenting with steel tubing, standardization, and geometric forms in the 1920s and 1930s. Dieckmann was born in present-day Poland in 1896. He studied architecture from 1918 to 1920 at the Technical University of Gdansk in Poland and served a carpentry apprenticeship at the Bauhaus in Weimar from 1921 to 1925. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, he remained in Weimar and became the head of the carpentry workshop at the State University of Applied Sciences until 1930.
Throughout the 1930s, he designed furniture as well as worked for various carpentry workshops and consulted for interior and craft design companies. Dieckmann’s furniture is often characterized by quality hardwoods, cane matting and geometric frames that link the armrests and legs, creating a unique runner construction. Designing affordable, enduring pieces that could be mass-produced was also one of his key efforts. Dieckmann passed away in Berlin in 1944, leaving behind an iconic body of Bauhaus-inspired seating.