Austrian Museum of Applied Arts - Bentwood Chairs

Bentwood furniture was not a Viennese invention, nonetheless outside Austria the bentwood chair is still frequently called "Viennese chair". The furniture manufactory Gebrüder Thonet developed the first industrial-scale production processes for bentwood furniture. These processes replaced previous individual craft skills with an investment in machinery that allowed any worker to produce accurate and repeatable bent components. The best known piece of the manufactury was the No. 14 chair, the iconic chair of Parisian cafés. The furniture collection of the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts presents an overview of over 100 years of production by Gebrüder Thonet an competing firms, from the 1830s to the 1930s.