Antique Green Leather Model 519F Armchair by Adolf Loos for Gebrüder Thonet Vienna GmbH, 1910s

Architect, designer, and theorist Adolf Loos is among the most influential pioneers of the modern movement and played an active role in the intellectual life of fin de siècle Vienna. Though the number of designs he realized in his lifetime is limited, his many writings and lectures railing against extraneous ornamentation—especially his treatise Ornament and Crime (1910/13)—would impact the course of design history through the generations that followed.

Loos was born in 1870 in Moravia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, what is now the city of Brno in the Czech Republic. His father was a stonemason, and his mother carried on the business when Loos’s father passed away unexpectedly. The younger Loos went on to study at technical schools, but never graduated.

Between 1893 and 1896, in his mid-20s, Loos adventured to the United States, where he was greatly impressed by the architecture of The Chicago School, including the buildings of Louis Sullivan (who also influenced Frank Lloyd Wright). He went back to Europe in 1896, armed with ideas about the modern era requiring a more minimal, rational aesthetic. Settling in Vienna—one of the world’s most vibrant intellectual centers at the time—Loos found his ideas about decoration at odds with the prevailing tastes, most especially as expressed in the work of the Vienna Secessionists, like Gustav Klimt, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Koloman Moser, and Josef Hoffmann. He was not shy about publicly decrying the expressionist and “decadent” approaches of his contemporaries. For Loos, the form and aesthetics of a design must come from the innate qualities of the materials used—nothing more. (Historians are much kinder to Hoffmann’s geometric ornamentation, in particular, and see it as a direct precursor to modernism.)

Around the turn of the 20th century, Loos worked for legendary Austrian architect Otto Wagner—another early pioneer of modernism—and celebrated the designs of Scottish talents like Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Loos’ design for the Steiner House in Vienna (1910) was one of the first private houses constructed in reinforced concrete and featured strong, pure geometry.

Loos designed few objects, but his famous bentwood and cane Café Museum Chair (1899) remains in production to this day with Thonet and Gebrüder Thonet Vienna. He died in 1933, just as the next generation under his influence—the likes of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and more—were themselves changing the course of design history.

Contemporary furniture manufacturing brand Gebrüder Thonet Vienna GmbH is the current Austrian incarnation of the legendary Thonet company, founded by German-Austrian cabinetmaker Michael Thonet in the 19th century.

Michael Thonet (1796-1871) set up his first cabinetmaking atelier in Boppard, Germany, in 1819, specialized in Biedermeier-style chairs, tables, and storage pieces, characterized by clean lines, reduced ornamentation, and an emphasis on functionalist principles. By the 1830s, Thonet’s experiments in laminated and steam-bent wood furniture, like his famous Boppard Chair (1836), brought international acclaim. Thonet’s designs achieved a marriage of lightness, durability, and comfort unknown in European furniture at the time.

In 1842, Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich of Austria invited Thonet to present his designs to the Viennese court. As financial challenges mounted at home, Thonet relocated his family and business from Germany to Vienna. In 1853, he transferred his company to his sons, and Gebrüder Thonet was established. A new factory was set up in Koryčany, Moravia in 1856, which brought access to the region’s wealth of beech wood, an ideal material for Thonet’s signature bentwood process.

Gebrüder Thonet’s bentwood chairs grew in popularity among the European vanguard in the decades leading up to the 20th century—years that coincided with the foundation of the design reform movement and the development of design as a profession. For pioneers of modernism like Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, the formal and material efficiency embodied in Gebrüder Thonet’s furniture became a shining example of what design should be in the modern era.

Iconic pieces from the traditional Gebrüder Thonet collection include Rocking Chair No. 1 (1860), No. 14 Café Chair (ca. 1859), Adolf Loos’s Café Museum Chair (1899), No. 209 Armchair (ca. 1900), Otto Wagner’s No. 247 Postal Savings Bank Chair (1904), and Josef Hoffmann’s No. 811 (1925). 

In 1976, Thonet was divided into two separate German and Austrian companies, which remain independent of each other. In 2003, driven by a personal passion for the company, Franco Moschini, head of Poltrona Frau Group, acquired Gebrüder Thonet Vienna GmbH. In 2013, Moschini brought in former Gufram CEO Riccardo Pigati to further revitalize the Gebrüder Thonet Vienna (GTV) brand and build on its rich legacy. To that end, GTV has moved production from Eastern Europe to Italy in order to better control quality. Furthermore, the company has increased efforts to create “new classics” in collaboration with major, international designers, such as Nigel Coates, Front, Gamfratesi, Martino Gamper, Michele de Lucchi, and Nendo. GTV continues to manufacture, as well, a number of Thonet masterpieces designed by Loos, Hoffmann, Wagner, and, of course, Michael Thonet himself.

* All images courtesy of Gebrüder Thonet Vienna