Chapter 4 – Behind the curtain

The opportunity to explore led Polish designers to start experimenting with plywood and wicker. Wicker had of course been used for centuries, however plywood was a relatively new material and hadn’t really been used for manufacturing furniture in Poland. The flexibility and endurance of plywood gave designers free rein for experimenting with construction. The artistic possibilities of plywood were first explored by Jan Kurzątkowski, a designer from the ŁAD Artists’ Co-operative and teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. His disciples continued his work.  Jan Krzątkowski’s student Teresa Kruszewska debuted with a set of furniture for the home.

It included the iconic Muszelka (Shell) chair. Shaped like a shell, the seat itself was made of plywood and sat on a sturdy steel frame. Then, Kruszewska wound colourful plastic string around the frame and seat over and over and over, creating a ‘woven’ chair. It came in a variety of colours and people absolutely loved it! Woven stools, baskets and even knock-off Muszelka chairs soon followed. The Muszelka chair stood out in 1956 and quickly became an icon of Polish design. Even though it was admired and presented at numerous trade shows around the globe, it was never actually put into mass production.

Maria Chomentowska, another one of Krzątkowski’s students, also used plywood in her designs. In search of a comfortable seat, the designer tried to take full advantage of plywood’s flexibility. The Płucka (Little Lungs) chair’s backrest consisted of two parts which, in shape, resembled… little lungs. Connected by a small leather strap, they gave the material some give and the user could lean back comfortably. The seat itself was also an interesting shape – its distinctive incisions allowed for the backrest to be hooked into the seat and almost seamlessly join the legs. The Płucka chair was both extremely simple and extraordinarily decorative. A wise and wonderful use of plywood.

“I would like to remind you that modern furniture should not be a capital investment: solid, expensive, bought to last a lifetime. It should be painless for its owner’s pocket and change with the needs of the household.”
— Maria Chomentowska

The A587 chair designed by Marian Sigmund, one of the founders of the ŁAD Artists’ Co-operative, was intended for export to Great Britain to be used as a school seat. The bentwood structure, both from plywood and solid beech wood, as well as the contrast between natural and black-dyed wood made the chair unique in its simplicity and beauty. Pupils today would be lucky to spend their school days in such a classy chair! Originally designed in 1957, the A587 chair was produced in 1958 at the Bentwood Furniture Factory in Jasienica. The factory, today the well-known Polish furniture company PAGED, came out with a new edition of the chair for its 100th anniversary in 2017.

Władysław Wołkowski was known as the ‘Michelangelo of Wicker’. A fascination with nature lay at the core of Wołkowski’s aesthetic and philosophical concepts. Wołkowski weaved, braided and pulled, looking for harmony in asymmetry. He never used existing designs. His Chuligan (Hooligan) chair is precisely that – a hooligan. Completely out of whack, not in keeping with standard expectations and kind of cheeky, one can’t help but be mesmerised by it. It is living proof that even something as simple as a wicker chair can be surprising.

“I can’t stand the monotony of technological civilisation, of industrial production standards. In nature there is infinite diversity and great harmony. There are no two leaves that are the same on a tree, and yet there are thousands of them on the tree.”
— Władysław Wołkowski

Acquiring plastics behind the Iron Curtain was not easy. Despite these difficulties, a few Polish designers managed to obtain them and began experimenting. Furniture with elements made from materials such as igelit, a popular polyvinyl chloride at the time, began to pop up in cafés and at exhibitions in big cities. More and more often, Poles were asking where and when they would be able to buy these chairs and tables for themselves. The biggest show of plastic furniture took place in 1958 in Kraków. It was the first time that people could not only admire it, but also buy it. They could take pieces created by Jan Szczurek, Halina Cieślicka, Maria Michajłow and Witold Popławski, straight home to their living and dining rooms. Resin was even harder to get your hands on. But there were always exceptions! And this exception lead to the creation of one of Poland’s most iconic designs.

The Armchair was ahead of its time. And people loved it. The chair was so popular it was featured in a number of Polish movies and a French furniture manufacturer was even interested in producing it. Modzelewski obtained a patent but was banned from selling it to the French by the communist regime. And so, in the following decades, the chair was only made-to-order. This instant icon had to wait half a century to finally go into mass production. Modzelewski’s iconic design remains fresh and compelling to this day. The Polish company VZÓR took it upon themselves to bring the armchair to today’s consumers. In 1958, despite plastics and resins being so inaccessible and Polish designers being relatively uninterested in the technology used for mass production, the artist and designer Roman Modzelewski created a surprising armchair. What’s so special about it? Well, it was one of the earliest Polish examples of polyester-glass laminate furniture. And that’s not all. Its fully-closed organic form was like nothing else created at the time – it impressed even Le Corbusier himself! Modzelewski created an armchair that was both beautiful and comfortable, and managed to avoid the imperfections of the material.