Bend it Like Morrison
The Iso-lounge chair, photographed in VG&P and Isokon Plus’s factory (photo: Nicola Tree).
Isokon Plus, the British furniture maker founded by Jack Pritchard in the early 1930s as the Isokon Furniture Company, has always been about innovation in plywood and pared-down, modern design. With the help of Jasper Morrison, it has now produced a single-piece, cantilevered lounge chair, something that eluded the great modernist designers of the 20th century. The result, named the Iso-lounge, is a distinctly 21st-century design, but as we look into the chronicles of Isokon, it becomes clear that the history of this chair stretches back in time, bridging the past with both the present and future.
When Pritchard began building the creative team of his fledging Isokon Furniture Company in the mid-1930s, he called on some of the biggest names of international modernism. As creative director, he appointed Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school in Germany. He named Marcel Breuer, former master at the Bauhaus and head of its furniture workshop, chief designer. As graphic designer, he chose László Moholy-Nagy, the multi-talented painter, graphic designer, and photographer who had been Gropius’s closest ally at the school. All three had recently moved into Pritchard’s Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, London, after fleeing the Nazi regime in Germany. Pritchard had commissioned this radical building, Britain’s first reinforced concrete block of flats, from the Canadian architect Wells Coates, and it was with him that Pritchard had started the Isokon company, intending to make buildings and furniture.
By the time the three Bauhäuslers arrived, however, Pritchard and Coates had fallen out over both money and who should receive credit as the instigator of the much-publicised building. Coates had not been new to furniture design – he had done tubular-steel designs for PEL, the closest that Britain ever came to creating a homegrown Thonet. Pritchard had experimented with his own designs too, but their achievements paled in comparison with Breuer, one of the originators of tubular-steel furniture in the mid-1920s. Given the situation, there were obvious benefits for all parties: Pritchard needed a replacement for Coates, and the three recently arrived Bauhäuslers desperately needed paid work in their new home country. For Pritchard, good design was not about products being beautiful – his key words were always “efficient”, “logical”, and “economical”, and this was also how his freshly appointed Bauhaus designers saw best to shape the modern world.
Since 1925, Pritchard had been working for Venesta (“Veneer Estonia”), the UK subsidiary of A.M. Luther, Europe’s largest plywood manufacturer. Venesta had a factory and wharf on the Isle of Dogs in London and employed some 1,500 people in Britain. As their sales and marketing manager, Pritchard was so convinced by the possibilities of plywood that people called him “Plywood Pritchard” behind his back, and he extolled the modern material whenever he could. Early on in his new job, he had met Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand in Paris, and engaged them to design a trade-fair stand for Venesta in London, making sure that the link between progressive architecture and plywood could not be missed. When it came to actually manufacturing Isokon’s furniture, Venesta had allowed Pritchard to set up the company as a sideline while he was still working for them. Isokon was a British brand, but the furniture was made at the huge A.M. Luther factory in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. For these reasons, Pritchard told the Bauhäuslers to focus on designs in plywood, the material of the future, and Breuer delivered a series of now-iconic designs, the most famous being the Isokon Long Chair. Plywood also inspired László Moholy-Nagy when Pritchard asked him to design a logotype for the Isokon Furniture Company. He came up with a modern typeface saying “ISOKON” over the slogan “For Ease, For Ever”, crowned by a curved cantilevered chair, made from a single piece of cross-laminated plywood.
László Moholy-Nagy’s logo for the Isokon Furniture Company.
There was just one problem with Moholy-Nagy’s logo design: there was no such chair in the Isokon collection. All of Breuer’s Isokon designs were made of several separate plywood components, held together by screws and bolts. Around the same time across London, Philip Morton Shand had started to import Alvar Aalto furniture from Finland through his company Finmar. Shand also commissioned a company logo that showed a single-piece plywood chair (although graphically less progressive than Moholy-Nagy’s logo design), but neither Finmar nor Aalto had such a chair. Aalto used solid birchwood that was split, steam-bent and subsequently glued back together, because making a single-piece plywood chair was technically too difficult. Not only would it require a highly complex mould with several curves, but each curve would add a potential breaking point to the plywood, a material that strives to return to its original, straight form.
The closest to achieving this was Gerald Summers and his company Makers of Simple Furniture, also London-based, whose plywood lounge chair looks as if it was cut out of paper. But Summers’s short-lived and small operation could never quite make the leap from arts and crafts to modernism, and his chair appears dated today. Using a single piece of this engineered, industrial, modern material to make a chair therefore remained a dream. After the Second World War, Charles and Ray Eames, Arne Jacobsen and several other designers experimented further, but the result was always part plywood, part metal – never a solid plywood chair in one piece. Verner Panton tried for years, starting in the 1950s, until he settled on injection-moulded plastic for his Panton chair for Vitra in 1967. Over time, plywood furniture went out of fashion, with aluminium, plastic and later carbon fibre replacing it. The material retreated into the shadows, becoming something builders used in sheet form as an underlay and then covered with more refined materials.
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The war saw Isokon’s equipment given over to the production of aeroplanes, but Pritchard restarted the brand in 1963, now with production based in Britain. A bestseller during the following decades was the Isokon Penguin Donkey Mark 2, designed by Ernest Race, a square bookcase that features no plywood, unlike its 1930s predecessor by Egon Riss. In 1982, Chris McCourt of Windmill Furniture took over the production after reaching an agreement with Pritchard. With the introduction of new designs by Barber and Osgerby, Michael Sodeau, and Shin and Tomoko Azumi, McCourt renamed his company Isokon Plus to reflect the additions to the brand’s historical designs. When Isokon Plus, which was acquired by its new owner Very Good & Proper (VG&P) in 2019, set out once again to add to its collection, this historical background was never far away, with the 1930s Moholy-Nagy Isokon logo a constant reminder of Pritchard’s original ambitions. Here was an opportunity to use Isokon’s heritage to define its future.
In deciding on the brief for the first new Isokon piece since the takeover, there was also the question of what was missing from the current collection: the 1936 Breuer Long Chair remains suitable for residential use, but less so for contract clients. Breuer’s design is now more than 80 years old, so a contemporary lounge chair was a long time coming. Choosing to work with Jasper Morrison fostered a natural continuation of the designs Barber and Osgerby had added to the Isokon collection over the preceding 25 years – the two studios share a sense of restraint in their work, which suits the language of the Isokon collection. When setting out to design the new addition, Morrison was well aware of the Moholy-Nagy logo with its curved chair, the Summers chair, and the Zig-Zag chair by Gerrit Reitveld, another cantilevered wooden chair from the 1930s, but he wanted to make a contemporary piece that could take the company’s offering forward. Naming it the Iso-lounge chair was a play on the word Isobar, the famous restaurant and bar at Lawn Road Flats that Breuer designed in 1937 and furnished with Isokon plywood furniture.
“What we’ve done is take the very simple basis of an idea and execute it as purely as possible. It’s a celebration of the
technology of plywood.”
Isokon Plus and Morrison now had to overcome the technical obstacles the 1930s modernists encountered when trying to make a single-piece plywood chair. This saw them embark on well over a year of experiments and prototypes. Little has changed since the 1930s when it comes to making plywood furniture, apart from better glues being available; it’s still essentially a process done by hand. But Isokon Plus has gained many decades of experience in pushing the technical boundaries of plywood, and it also now has the modern aid of computer-generated designs and calculations. These were essential for working out changes in the thickness of the chair, tapering it such that the back could be made thinner than the seat and base. This was not only visually important, but also made the back less rigid, adding comfort through the wood’s flex. Rather than running each layer of plywood throughout the chair, from top to bottom, the team tapered several internal layers, but they had to do so at different positions in order to create a seamless thinning out, which required detailed calculations. To give the user greater comfort, the back also needed to be curved, while the seat and the base remained straight, and all this had to be made in a single mould.
Further adding to the complexity, was the fact that plywood is usually cross-laminated at a 90-degree angle. This perpendicular layering creates a distinct edge, where each layer stands out. Morrison did not like this visual effect, however, preferring a less visible line that made the chair read as a solid piece. The solution, then, was to introduce a third angle into the lamination process, cutting across the other two. This addition makes the chair stronger, but in combination with the tapering it also makes it even more complex to produce. Ed Carpenter, VG&P and Isokon Plus’s director, stresses that the chair’s success is down to their manufacturing director Mark Smith, aided by the technical advice of former Isokon Plus owner Chris McCourt and the long experience of the designer. “Jasper Morrison has achieved something extremely special with Iso-lounge,” says Carpenter. “It manages to both respect our heritage and define our future. There is clearly a direct lineage to the Isokon of the 1930s and our classic Marcel Breuer pieces, however Iso-lounge has an identity all of its own.”
The Iso-lounge arrives at a time when plywood seems to have come full circle. The V&A gave plywood its own exhibition in 2017, and many kitchens and interiors are now clad with unpainted plywood, showing the natural grain of the wood. Perhaps it’s the honesty of the material that appeals – it may be engineered, but it’s not human-made like plastic, and the best plywood is still Baltic birch. So, while the Iso-lounge chair may have a historical starting point, the design is clearly contemporary, and so is the material. Plywood doesn’t need to be covered over any longer – there is no need to paint or upholster it.
The final result is both elegant and restrained, comfortable and technically advanced, all at the same time. “What we’ve done is take the very simple basis of an idea and execute it as purely as possible,” says Morrison. “That has taken an incredible amount of collaboration, testing and prototyping to achieve. It’s a celebration of the technology of plywood in a way. It is still cutting edge – there are not many materials you could do this with to achieve a practical result.” The Iso-lounge is a chair that would have made Jack “Plywood” Pritchard very proud, fulfilling his almost century-old criteria of good design as being efficient, logical and economical. In this precise process, it has also become beautiful.
Words Magnus Englund
Photographs Nicola Tree
This article was originally published in Disegno #30. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.