Formless Furniture - eMuseum

Formless Furniture
Museum für Gestaltung Zürich
11 November 2009 – 14 February 2010
Sacco, 1968
Design: Gatti, Paolini, Teodoro
Manufacturer: Zanotta
Vinyl-coated textile, styrofoam pellets
© MAK/Georg Mayer
Terrazza DS 1025, 1973
Design: Ubald Klug, De Sede AG
Manufacturer: De Sede AG
Polster auf Holzsockel. Bezug Leder
© Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Designsammlung/ Foto: Franz Xaver Jaggy
Armchair (Portrait of my Mother’s Chesterfield Chair), 1964
Design: Gunnar Aagaard Andersen
Manufacturer: Dansk Polyether Industri
Polyurethane foam
© Tecta/MAK
Sofa LOGO, 1994, Unique piece
Designed and produced by Bär +Knell
Base made of used plastic packagings, dyed black
Upper side made of used shopping bags and packagings showing brand logos
© MAK/Georg Mayer
PUBLICATION
Formless Furniture, edited by Peter Noever, concept and text by
Sebastian Hackenschmidt and Dietmar Rübel, German/English, MAK,
Vienna /Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2008, CHF 42
GUIDED TOURS (in German)
Every Tuesday, 6.30pm
Every first Sunday monthly 3pm
New as of 1 January 2010:
Wednesday, 6pm: 6.1./13.1./20.1./27.1./3.2./10.2.
Sunday, 11am: 10.1./17.1./24.1./31.1./7.2.
Information for guided tours (also in English), workshops and events
on: www.museum-gestaltung.ch
EXHIBITION TALKS (in German)
Dienstag, 17. November 2009, 18.30 Uhr
Zeitlos formlos
Mit Prof. Dr. Jacqueline Otten, Direktorin Departement Design ZHdK
und Cynthia Gavranic
Dienstag, 8. Dezember 2009, 18.30 Uhr
Formlose Körperhaltungen
Mit Esther Sutter Straub, Publizistin im Bereich Tanz, Pädagogin für
zeitgenössischen Tanz und Tai Ji, Basel und Cynthia Gavranic
Mittwoch, 6. Januar 2009, 18 Uhr
Formlos schön?
Mit Jörg Boner, Designer Zürich und Cynthia Gavranic
Mittwoch, 27. Januar 2010, 18 Uhr
Gegen die „Gute Form“
Mit Arthur Rüegg, Architekt Zürich und Cynthia Gavranic
OPENING TIMES 2009
Tuesday–Thursday 10am–8pm, Friday–Sunday 10am–5pm
Closed on Mondays as well as on 25.12. and 1.1.
New as of 1 January 2010:
Tuesday–Thursday 10am–5pm, Wednesday 10am–8pm
IMPRINT
Exhibition concept: Sebastian Hackenschmidt, MAK, Vienna and
Dietmar Rübel
Curator and project management: Cynthia Gavranic
Scientific collaboration: Gabriella Disler, Nathalie Killias
Coordination: Christine Kessler
Exhibition design: Françoise Krattinger
Construction: Jürg Abegg / Andrea Castiglia, Nils Howald, Frank
Landes, Mohsen Rahimi, Domenico Scrugli, Mark Weibel
Graphic design: Moritz Wolf
Communication: Bernadette Mock
Publishing: Christina Reble / Annamaria Keel
Museum services: Mireille Osmieri / Reto Blaschitz
Head of exhibitions: Angeli Sachs
Photography: ZHdK Fotoatelier
Translations: Steven Gander, Wien
Print media: Hi – Visuelle Gestaltung, Claudio Barandun / Megi
Zumsteig, Luzern
Workshops: Elfi Anderegg, Zürich
The educational programme of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich
and the Museum Bellerive is supported by the CREDIT SUISSE
FOUNDATION
An exhibition by the MAK, Vienna
Museum für Gestaltung Zürich
Christian Brändle, Director
Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Zürcher Fachhochschule
FORMLESS FURNITURE—can there be such a thing?
Isn’t it so that all material things and objects have a
form, whether it is solidly outlined or fluid and transient?
Don’t everyday utility objects have a predefined form
which derives from, and at the same time expresses,
its function? And isn’t it so that, particularly, furniture
has taken various different forms over the centuries,
which made it appear as typical of a certain style or
taste, a specific epoch, school, tradition, fashion, region,
or nation? Ever since the 1960s, designers have
kept trying, with material experiments and alternative
design approaches, to develop counter-proposals to
existing designs and to create formless objects whose
complex arrangements and formations still remain to
be explored. In their chaotic structures, the un-forms
of felt strips, heaps of rags, wire mesh, poured plastic
and foamed-up piles often go even beyond overladen
Baroque forms, signaling a radical breach with the geometrical
vocabulary of classical and modernist design.
And the anti-aesthetic category of formlessness still
serves well to playfully undermine common notions of
“good form”: formless furniture is not least to be understood
as a deliberate offense against good taste, or
as a rejection of conventional tenets in interior design.
A central role in this is played by materials: formless
furniture is the result of certain material qualities rather
than design. Many of the objects exhibited have no
definite form, but are changeable in appearance due
to their softness and flexibility. What has always gone
together with furniture-like anti-forms is the hope of
countering the standardized uniformity of objects and
everyday life with alternative designs for living: formless
furniture is meant to provoke critical intervention and
irritations that could probably lead to new ways of life
and behavior. The exhibition Formless Furniture for the
first time brings together various different aspects and
manifestations of the formless in furniture design, focusing
on changing concepts of amorphous forms since the
mid-1960s. The historical point of departure is marked
by Gunnar A. Andersen’s polyurethane Armchair around
which the exhibition is organized. In it, objects from the
colorfully euphoric plastic age meet with furniture made
of consciously simple and poor materials and with the
computer-generated Blobjects of the digital age.
AGAINST GOOD FORM The formless furniture of the
1960s resulted from the unbridled possibilities of the
material and was a conscious offense against the primacy
of form. In its deliberate unshapeliness, it was
a counter-strategy to the austere design maxims that
had informed the taste of the postwar period. Above all,
however, it meant the renunciation of that design dogma
which many designers hoped would help them return
to the sobriety and functionality of classical modernity
after World War II: the so-called Good Form. In a context
of recovery and a fresh start, this concept was sup-

posed to set an obligatory standard for quality product
design—and to fulfill a social and aesthetic educational
mission: education to Good Form by Good Form. This
aesthetic ideal was not clearly defined, but the goals
were simplicity, functionality, material and production
suitability, high quality and durability, both for industrial
and craft products. In almost all Western-European
countries, organizations and institutions were founded in
the postwar period, which, in the interest of international
competitiveness, propagated quality design, held sample
fairs, awarded prizes, and thus sought to promote,
frequently with the support of governments industries,
the production of well-designed objects. Similar to the
“Good Form” quality seal, a “Good Design” Award was
given in the USA by the renowned New York Museum of
Modern Art.
in this way a variety of shapeless furniture informed less
by common tastes than by the qualities and possibilities
of the materials used. Unlike Gunnar A. Andersen’s Armchair
or Jerszy Seymour’s provocative Scum installation
whose amorphous-sculptural mass seems to be solely
inspired by the material qualities of the polyurethane,
Pesce keeps control of the idiosyncrasies of the unbridled
materials and substances, sometimes combining
them with an anthropomorphous formal vocabulary.
FORMLESS SITTING POSITIONS The exhibition of
Formless Furniture exclusively features seating furniture,
which, being particularly body-related, has always
been a central field of experimentation in furniture design.
Designers were mainly interested to convey a more
playful approach to things and to champion new positions
and attitudes directed against rigid conventions
and traditional views. Particularly in the years around
ibility and conformability, grew into something like a Pop
art icon. As a homage to this design classic, Ron Arad
and Karim Rashid made the Sacco a starting point and
reference of their own designs.
BLOBJECTS From about the mid-1980s, designers
started developing a hard-to-define formal vocabulary
used for all kinds of everyday objects from toothbrush
to motorbike. These organic looking everyday things
with their fluid and curving shapes were generically
referred to as Blobjects—a neologism created from
‘blob’ (meaning a small lump, drop, or splotch) and
‘object’. The emergence of Blobjects is inextricably
linked with computer-aided design. Being the result
of an attempt of using an automated and rationalized
design process to get to autonomous—nonanticipated
and significance-free—useful forms beyond traditional
ideal conceptions, Blobjects make a daring foray into
REFUSE AND RAGS In the wake of industrialization and
urbanization, waste has had much attraction for artists
ever since the late 19th century. The enthusiasm for
worthless waste materials previously considered as unfit
for art was the result of a search for unusual materials
which did not carry any given implications as art materials.
The fact that these wastes were free of the burden
of tradition and predefined modes of use explains why
they played such a role on modernist art production.
As utility objects, the waste materials coming under the
umbrella term of Refuse and Rags mostly had clearly
defined functions, but, once gone out of use and thrown
away, were “dis-formed”—as the Dadaist poet and artist
Kurt Schwitters put it who was one of the first to use not
only scrap paper, but also waste cans and rusty nails,
as well as found buttons or wooden parts in his artwork,
blurring the boundary between high and low and between
the spheres or art and everyday life. In the realm of de-
Corallo, 2004
Design: Fernando und Humberto Campana
Manufacturer: Edra
Barbed wire, coral-red powder coating
© MAK/Georg Mayer
Blow, 1967
Design: Gionatan De Pas, Donato D’Urbino, Paolo Lomazzi, Carla Scolari
Manufacturer : Zanotta S.p.A.
PVC
© Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Designsammlung/ Foto: Franz Xaver Jaggy
Grandpa Beaver, 1987
Chair from the “Experimental Edges” series
Design: Frank Gehry
Manufacturer: New City Editions
Laminated corrugated cardboard
© MAK/Georg Mayer
Feltri, 1987
Design: Gaetano Pesce
Manufacturer: Cassina
Felt, epoxy resin, hemp cord, cotton
© MAK/Georg Mayer
FORMLESS PLASTICS The capability for assimilation
into almost any form has over and again been considered
a taint adhering to plastics. Already in the 19th
century, the lack of any material-specific form, that is, of
a shape deriving from the natural structure of the material,
lead to a stigmatization of the predecessors of today’s
synthetic materials. Around 1860, for example, the
architect Gottfried Semper referred to rubber, because
of its adaptability, as the “ape among usable materials.”
Like almost no other, the Italian designer and architect
Gaetano Pesce—incidentally, the only one represented
with several objects in the exhibition—continually and
consistently explored the formal possibilities of synthetics.
From the beginnings of his career, he had the shape
of his conceptions defined by the material itself, creating
1968, affirmative bourgeois culture was challenged with
new types of furniture: fanciful seating objects called
for new ways to use them—relaxed sitting positions and
provocative postures as had hitherto not been part of
the accepted social conduct. The point was to find out
in what various ways the new flexible furniture could
be used and what was possible with—and through—it
outside long-accustomed habits. The famous Sacco—
actually only a plastic, fabric, or leather bag filled with
Styrofoam pellets—is considered the most convincing
prototype in this development toward more mobility and
flexibility in the domestic sphere. A light, moveable, and
affordable piece of furniture, mostly in glaring colors,
the Sacco was in line with the spirit of the epoch in 1968
and, over the years and because of its exceptional flex-
the sphere of formlessness. Paradoxically, it is the Superblob
of the designer Karim Rashid which translates,
with its computer generated bubbles and curves, the
formlessness of the Sacco into a contemporary formal
vocabulary. Architect and designer Greg Lynn, on the
other hand, uses the computer to arrive at systematic
deviations from customary patterns and models. The
challenge for him is “to write—in form—a monument
that is irreducible to any ideal geometry.” Exemplary of
other furniture types which, of course, would also admit
of formless experiments stands his seat “The Duke”.
sign, artists used products of waste materials to protest
against the throwaway society in industrial nations and
tried to break away—as Frank Gehry, Bär+Knell, or Tejo
Remy did—from this utilization cycle by making objects
of recycled materials. Waste paper, plastic packages,
and rags are not only used in an attempt to indicate
ecologic and economic alternatives, but in fact are
historical memory media—while, for example, the Sofa
Logo brings out the collective memory of the consumer
society, the discarded garments used for the Rag Chair
contain the personal memories of their owners.