Series editors' preface - Wood Tools

major feature, and confirmed the separation of
maker and seller. In France, the trade was centred
on Paris, often with businesses run by
German cabinetmakers alongside French ones.
The businesses of Joseph-Emanuel Zwiener
and François Linke were two of the most well
known. By the 1880s there were around 17,000
workers in the Paris industry alone. By 1790
the marking of goods was no longer a requirement,
following the disbandment of the guilds,
but was revived in the early nineteenth century
by makers stamping furniture or engraving the
brass-work with the firm’s name. Rather than a
guild control, the stamp was a promotional
device encouraged by retailers.
The main input by Austria during the nineteenth
century was the development of the
bentwood furniture industry. By 1900, the
Thonet company employed 6000 workers producing
4000 pieces per day and there were
another 25,000 workers employed in Austria
alone in other bentwood businesses.
Publications remained an important part of
the trade’s network and are indicative of the
conservative approach to design. In 1788 the
Cabinet-Makers’ Book of Prices was published
and was reissued throughout the nineteenth
century. In 1802 came the London Chair-makers’
and Carvers’ Book of Prices. In 1803
Thomas Sheraton’s Cabinet Dictionary was
published and in 1829 Thomas King brought
out The Modern Style of Cabinet Work
Exemplified. This was reissued unaltered in
1862, testimony to conservative style. In 1833,
Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage Farm and
Villa Architecture was produced. Later in the
century the decorators and pundits of various
styles wrote ‘how to decorate’ books. These
included works by Charles Eastlake, Clarence
Cooke, Ogden Codman and Edith Wharton,
Christopher Dresser as well as a growing number
of magazines and journals.
One of the most important developments in
the United States was the expansion of the furniture
industry into the mid-west and southern
states. Improved transportation and an abundance
of water and timber in states such as
Indiana, Illinois and Ohio meant that firms like
Mitchell and Rammelsburg of Cincinnati or
whole cities like Chicago or Grand Rapids and
(later) South Carolina and High Point could
trade with the East and West Coast centres successfully.
1.6 The twentieth century
Furniture history 35
Context
The twentieth century, sometimes called the
machine age, has seen such a great variety of
designs of furniture that generalizations are
meaningless. Advances in materials use and
production techniques led to major changes in
the production of furniture. Designers with a
knowledge of materials and techniques that
were developed to meet the new demands
were employed to design furniture for largescale
production. The division between production
furniture and designers’ limited
editions grew as the market for furniture
increased rapidly.
The twentieth century has produced such a
wide ranging variety of forms of furniture that
any general statements are not very useful. The
variety of factors that have always affected furniture
design, i.e. the nature of consuming, the
training of craftsmen, the intellectual background,
the technical aspects, the critical
acceptance of work, and the prevailing style
and fashion have been even more varied in the
twentieth century so that we can see sculptural
fine art furniture through to full blown reproductions
of historical styles in modern plastic
materials.
These factors led to two separate developments:
one, the rise of modernism and
machine production and the other, the continued
development of the craftsman–designer’s
influence. Two important examples of the first
are the Bauhaus metal products of the 1920s
(Figure 1.23) and the post-war use of synthetics,
such as plastics.
The complicated story of the rise of modern
furniture can only be hinted at here. Artistic
movements including Cubism, De Stijl,
Constructivism, Expressionism and Futurism
have had degrees of influence on furniture
design. However, architects who designed furniture
for specific interiors, including Lutyens,
Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd
Wright and Rietveld (to name a few), produced
icons of modern design that often have little
relation to the productions of the major furniture
factories but are symbolic of the twentieth
century. After the First World War the fashionable
Art Deco style was adopted for commercial
as well as high-style furniture. The work of
the French designers Jean Dunand, Pierre