I was pleasantly surprised that the Museum of Modern Art was open on July 4th, when it was a million degrees in my apartment and most other activities were closed for the holiday. I figured the museum would at least have good air conditioning. Evidently I was not the only one with this idea. The place was fairly crowded, with art lovers and natives and World Cup tourists alike.
One of the high points of the visit was seeing furniture made by Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965) an architect who immigrated to the US from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 1920s. Although Kiesler didn't have much of an impact commercially in furniture design, he did design some important buildings and some landmark furniture.
The Kiesler work shown here are the original Surrealist-inspired "Multi-Use Chairs" that Kiesler designed in 1942 for Peggy Guggenheim's "Art of This Century" gallery in New York. The chairs are made of linoleum clad oak. The original materials bill was $9 each. Depending on how you flipped or stacked the chairs, each unit could also serve as a rocker, table, bench, sculpture pedestal, easel, or painting support. Kiesler claimed 18 distinct uses (which might be hyperbole, as the show included no official list). The idea is that depending on the gallery and the usage, you could reconfigure the same furniture for different uses.
How practical or comfortable these pieces are I have no idea - the museum did not welcome visitors to take a load off their feet. I don't know if the materials used - Oak and Linoleum - were chosen because of ideological commitment to the Bauhaus movement's veneration of common materials, or if Kiesler was being practical and frugal and therefore took some solid oak flooring (that looks like it was repurposed from something else) and some linoleum was just handy, fit the budget, and got his point about form and function across. Nine bucks for materials even in 1942 was not a lot of money. These days I would think the end caps would be fancy plywood, with fancy bent veneer instead of linoleum for the sides. And at a hundred times the cost.
The pieces are too modern for Ikea. (The market for really ground breaking shapes and forms is pretty small.) And they are certainly not what Ikea specializes in (cheaply made versions of Scandinavian / Mid-century modern) but I could easily imagine something like these pieces in a modern apartment. They'd offer a comfortable conversation piece, if nothing else. Unfortunately I couldn't find any drawings of how this thing is put together. AI bot Claude said that a 1942 original in the Brooklyn Museum (not at MoMA) measures 29 1/8" × 30 1/2" × 15 5/8".
What's important is that 84 years after their introduction, the pieces still look modern and avant-garde, and a striking departure from what most people imagine when you say the word "furniture." And more importantly: the work isn't an evolution of an existing design vocabulary, much less a stop on a recognizable tour of furniture design movement with Colonial, Shaker, Arts & Crafts, mid-century Modern/Danish modern/Ikea, etc. It really is a new approach. They are wildly original.
The lesson for all of us is that our design approach and what we build are always influenced by our training, budget, and history. Coming up with anything good that is also actually new is hard. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. But at the same time, recognize your influences. It is perfectly excellent to design something where you take a known design and push it into something you like, with better construction, materials, and more appropriate design for the intended space. But it's also worthwhile to occasionally go all the way out to left field, and pluck a design from space.
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