Mengel Module Furniture
Morris B. Sanders
Three pieces of promotional/sales ephemera for Morris B. Sanders Mengel Module Furniture line designed in 1946 and produced by the Mengel Furniture Company of Louisville, Kentucky.
- Frances Heard: SECTIONALS HAVE COME A LONG WAY. New York: House Beautiful, December 1946. Slim quarto. Printed stapled self wrappers. 8 pp. Photo illustrated article. Publishers offprint from House Beautiful December 1946. Horizontal fold for mailing, otherwise a very good example.
- Morris Sanders: MENGEL MODULE [The furniture that YOU design]. Cleveland, OH: The May Company, n. d. Folded 16-panel brochure printed in black and red. Laid in folded printed grid chart back with Mengel Module specifications. Expected ligaht wear at folds, but a very good or better example.
- Mengel Furniture Company: LET’S PLAN A BEDROOM AROUND YOU. Louisville, KY: The Mengel Company, 1948. Slim oblong quarto. Photo illustrated stapled self wrappers. 24 pp. Color and black and white photographs and furniture diagrams. Light wear overall, but a very good or better copy.
Within these three pieces are all of the specifications, finishes, combinations and any information you might need to identify these vintage case goods. I suspect this information might be useful to some people out there.
In 1940, probably due to the widespread influence of his mentor Walter Gropius, Elliot Noyes became the first curator of the new Industrial Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That year Noyes organized and presided over the famous competitive exhibition Organic Design in Home Furnishings and published a catalogue documenting the results. On the inside cover Noyes set the competition terms with his definition of Organic Design: “A design may be called organic when there is an harmonious organization of the parts within the whole, according to structure, material, and purpose. Within this definition there can be no vain ornamentation or superfluity, but the part of beauty is none the less great—in ideal choice of material, in visual refinement, and in the rational elegance of things intended for use.”
Also on the inside cover, alongside his own definition of organic design, Noyes included two quotations from Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization: “Our capacity to go beyond the machine rests in our power to assimilate the machine. Until we have absorbed the lessons of objectivity, impersonality, neutrality, the lessons of the mechanical realm, we cannot go further in our development toward the more richly organic, the more profoundly human. The economic: the objective: and finally the integration of these principles in a new conception of the organic — these are the marks, already discernible, of our assimilation of the machine not merely as an instrument of action but as a valuable mode of life.”
Here was the central problem of design, as Noyes saw it in 1940. The chair, and the living room, were points of interface between the human and the machine. The success of that interaction hinged on the development of a newly organic — that is, newly organized — environment, and demanded the study of the boundary between human and machine (to be defined later as ergonomics).
The Organic Design competition provided an intellectual roadmap for American industrial designers for rethinking furniture design during the the War years, when material scarcity dictated theory over practice. In March 1947 Interiors magazine trumpeted the return of American furniture manufacturing with a profile “Available now: the best furniture in years” featuring new work by George Nelson, Hans and Florence Knoll, Bruno Mathsson, Charles Eames, Edward Wormley, Eleanor Forbes, T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings and called the launching of Sanders’ Module Line “a nail on the head for contemporary living if it could be made available in sufficient quantity.”
Morris B. Sanders (1904 - 1948) was a prominent architect and designer, based in New York City from the late 1920s through 1948. Born in Arkansas in 1904, his parents operated a successful plumbing company in Little Rock and his uncle, Theodore M. Sanders (1879-1947), studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and worked as an architect. The Sanders family was quite comfortable; Morris attended the Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachusetts, and Yale University, graduating from the Yale College of Fine Arts in 1927. According to a 1946 advertisement, before settling in Manhattan he traveled to North Africa and studied cabinet- making in Paris. In addition, claims were later made that he “coordinated” an industrial arts exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art during 1928. He married his first wife, the window display designer Altina Schinasi, in 1928 and a lavish, multi-page spread of their sparely-decorated apartment appeared in Architect magazine. Sanders received a license to practice architecture in New York State in December 1929. It appears that he usually worked independently, first, at 18 East 41st Street, and later, at 211 East 49th Street.
The planning of Sanders Studio coincided with his appointment as head of the art department at Shenley Liquors in April 1934, and the death of his father in February 1935. Sanders became a prominent designer, recognized for interiors and consumer goods, including ceramics, lighting, and furniture. He co-designed a pavilion for the Distilled Spirits Institute at the 1939 World’s Fair, with future neighbor Morris Lapidus, as well as many commercial and residential projects, some of which appeared in Better Homes & Gardens magazine and other publications. During the Second World War, he worked in the consumer products division of the Office of Price Administration (OPA). He became vice president of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in the mid-1940s. Life magazine described Sanders as “inventive and talented” and his modular furniture, produced by the Mengel Company of Louisville, Kentucky, was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946.
Sanders died in the building in 1948, and a year later, in August 1949, the house was sold. Though some newspapers reported that Sanders died of a heart attack, his neighbor and sometime collaborator Morris Lapidus, claimed it was a suicide. Together, they designed the Distilled Spirits Institute Building at the 1939-40 World’s Fair in Queens and had contemplated forming a partnership. Lapidus, who found Sanders difficult, later recalled: “I knew Morris Sanders by reputation; an enviable one for a man so young ... [Sanders] worked and lived in a converted brownstone on East 49th Street. He had created a fine modern building, one of the first of its kind, with large window areas framed with blue glazed brick.”
The sole obituary appeared in Interiors magazine. Among his achievements, his furniture designs and his “glass and royal blue brick fronted office and home at 219 East 49th Street” were highlighted as significant.
“From [Morris Sanders’] drawing board came the Mengel Module line, a significant step in the mass manufacture of modern furniture.” — from the obituary, Interiors, October 1948