515 Dining Chairs by Oswald Haerdtl for TON, 1960s, Set of 4

One of the most respected designer-architects of the interwar and postwar period, Oswald Haerdtl was born in Vienna in 1899. He is best known for his early expressions of modernist design, especially those that contributed to Vienna's famous Kaffeehaus culture, as well as for his collaborations with iconic Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann.

Haerdtl trained as an architect under Oskar Strnad and Josef Frank, graduating in 1921 with the Eitelberger Prize for academic achievement from the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 1922, Haerdtl took an assistant position with Hoffmann, who became his mentor and later his colleague as they collaborated on many different projects. Haerdtl notably worked with Hoffmann’s team at the Exposition Internationale des Art Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in 1925. While in Paris, he took the opportunity to visit the studios and see the works of his favorite modernists, including Le Corbusier, Jean Lurçat, and André Lurçat, and Fernand Léger.

Returning to Vienna, Haerdtl set up studio at the Werkbundsiedlung in Vienna, a residential project lead by his former teacher Josef Frank and other well known architects, which was intended to be an exemplar of modern living. There, he produced his first solo projects, including the design of several residential and office buildings. His designs were chosen to represent Austria in the world fairs in Brussels in 1935 and in Paris in 1937. In 1935, he also accepted a professorship in architecture from his former teacher Oskar Strnad at his alma mater.

Although criticized for employing Jewish contractors to produce his architectural and design projects following the Anschluss of Austria to Nazi Germany in 1938, Haerdtl continued to work at the university. He avoided military conscription in 1940 after appeals were made on his behalf and he was declared “indispensable” to the university. Still, his studio suffered from the war, so he opened offices in Krakow and Wroclaw, where he designed hotels, offices, and camouflage for industrial equipment.

A Viennese institution, the Kaffeehaus found renewed popularity in the 1950s, Haerdtl found a great deal of work creating café interiors, as well as menus, vases, cutlery, glassware, and tableware. His café chairs were produced by Thonet, which, although also made from bentwood, exhibited a more modern aesthetic than Thonet’s original No.14 Chair. Waitstaff uniforms—deemed an as essential element of the cafés' interior decoration— were often designed by Haerdtl’s wife, Carmela. Haerdtl's famous café interiors include the Café Prükel (1939, completely reconstructed in 1954), Arabia (1950-57), and Hotel Bristol (1948-55).

Haerdtl died suddenly in August 1959. He has since been the subject of two retrospective exhibitions, in 1978 and in 2000, both in Vienna. He was the recipient of many prizes and honors including the Golden Merit Medal of the Republic of Austria (1934 and 1937), the Austrian State Prize for Architecture (1937), and the City of Vienna Prize for Architecture (1948).

Contemporary furniture producer TON is the long-living Czech incarnation of the legendary Thonet company—the oldest surviving furniture manufacturer in the world—founded by German-Austrian cabinetmaker and entrepreneur Michael Thonet in the late 19^th century. An acronym for “Továrna ohýbaného nábytku” (in Czech, “Factory for bentwood furniture”), TON nominally refers to the Bystřice pod Hostýnem-based factory that Thonet himself established in 1861.

Bystřice pod Hostýnem was chosen as the site for TON thanks to its abundance of skilled labor and beech wood, the crucial raw material for Thonet's signature steam-bent wood furniture. The factory quickly blossomed into the primary manufacturing base (out of, eventually, seven) for the greater Thonet. By 1912, the company there employed 2000 workers, who yielded, annually, a range both prolific and pioneering—about 445,000 total pieces of Thonet’s tables, storage pieces, and, most iconically, chairs.

Like all iteration of Thonet’s designs, TON’s bentwood forms are characterized by clean lines, reduced ornamentation, and an emphasis on functionalist principles. Specific standouts from this collection—so revered, actually, that TON still produces them today—include: Rocking Chair No. 1 (1860); No. 14 Café Chair (ca. 1859); Adolf Loos Café Museum Chair (1899); No. 209 Armchair (ca. 1900); No. 30 Armchair (ca. 1903, and a particular favorite of Le Corbusier); Otto Wagner No. 247 Postal Savings Bank Chair (1904); and Josef Hoffmann No. 811 (1925). 

World Wars I and II—and the attendant wide-ranging socio-political impacts—fractured the Thonet empire. In 1923, amid diminishing profits, Thonet was forced to merge with Austro-Hungarian furniture manufacturer Kohn-Mundus, forming Thonet-Mundus, who, among other things, purchased the license to produce the bent tubular steel designs of Bauhaus masters such as Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Mart Stam. Amid the Nazi rise to power, the company waded through years of upheaval, undergoing a series of headquarter relocations (to Switzerland; to the US) and changes to its ownership structure, before splintering in the postwar period. In 1946, the factory in Bystřice pod Hostýnem became a national enterprise and in 1953 was officially named TON, to distinguish itself against surviving Thonet constitutents (e.g., Gebrüder Thonet Vienna GmbH ).

Active since it’s renaming, TON established itself as a design brand as part of the company’s restructuring at the end of the Cold War, when it became a state-owned enterprise. Using some of the factory’s original machines and molds—and collaborating with modern talents that span from Arik Levy to Alex Gufler and Lucie Koldová—today’s TON produces a range of furniture, tables, and accessories that marries the company’s time-honored methods with the principles and forms of contemporary design.

Since 2011, their portfolio has garnered heaps of international decoration, including the Red Dot Design Award (2011, for their plywood-molded Merano Armchair; 2016, for their -designed Split loungechair); the Good Design award (2011, for Merano; 2013, for their Thomas Feichtner-designed Tram chair and cantilevered Mojo armchair, designed by Michael Riabič); and the iF Design Award (2015, for their bent-plywood Merano Chair; 2017, for their Leaf Chair, designed by Italian designers E-ggs), among others.