Norman Cherner

I started this blog September 6, 2010. Some of you have been readers since the beginning. Others have come on board later. From now through the end of the month, I'm going to be on a short blogging break. Not only am I in the middle of a big volunteer project, I'm also trying to help get the new store open, so I've decided share some of my favorite posts from the past four years. I'll throw in a few new photos for you longtime supporters who read the posts when they were first published.


(First posted 12/30/2010)

Norman Cherner (1920-1987) studied at Columbia University and later taught there in the Fine Arts Department. He was also an instructor at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1947-1949, where he explored the Bauhaus concept of multidisciplinary design. While he is best known for his furniture, he also designed graphics, glassware and lighting, as well as prefabricated housing.

One of the first pre-fabricated houses in the United States was Cherner's "Pre-built". It was designed, produced and assembled in 1957 for the U.S. Department of Housing. After being exhibited in Vienna it was shipped back to Connecticut to become his first home and studio outside of New York City.

Norman Cherner's furniture designs include a modular storage system, the "Konwiser Line" of furniture and lighting and molded plywood seating for Plycraft which he designed in 1958. The molded plywood "Cherner Chair" became his most recognized design and is found in furniture collections worldwide.

When Cherner presented his design for the famous chair to Plycraft, he was told it was impractical to produce, yet six months later, he saw the chair on a showroom floor attributed to a designer named "Bernardo," who was a creation of the Plycraft marketing department. Cherner sued Plycraft and won. As a result of the legal actions, the chair is sometimes attributed to the fictitious Bernardo, to Cherner, and even to Paul Goldman, the founder of Plycraft. The chair appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in a Norman Rockwell illustration, so it is sometimes even referred to as the "Rockwell Chair."

If you'd like to see a beautiful Cherner chair restoration, see my Toshmahal post about Dallas furniture restorer/refinisher Hank Tosh.  He brought a badly abused chair back to life.

From chernerchair.com, designaddict.com and dwr.com

Cherner armchair

furniture.architecture.sk

Cherner chairs
woodindesign.com

Cherner table
1stdibs.com

Cherner armchairs and side chairs

chernerchair.com

Cherner upholstered chair

chairblog.eu

Cherner iron and maple chair

1stdibs.com

Cherner iron and walnut tables

1stdibs.com

Cherner barstools

eventlucky.com

You look so familiar: Part 2 - Molded Plywood

Michael Thonet patented his bent wood furniture process in 1841 and experimented with plywood in the 1880s. During World War I, the aviation industry found ways to make plywood more flexible and durable, and in the years following the war, modernist designers found that plywood offered a solution to their search for a material that could be inexpensively mass produced.

In 1927 Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, a Dutch cabinetmaker, made a seat from a single piece of plywood. Then, in the early 1930s,  Alvar Aalto produced plywood stacking stools and the Paimio chair, which had  a one-piece plywood seat and back in a plywood frame. In 1936 Marcel Breuer created a molded plywood dining table.

By the early 1940s, young American designers such as Eero Saarinen, Charles Eames and Isamu Noguchi and a young British designer name Gerald Summers began to work in molded plywood. In 1946 the MoMA asked Eames to stage his first one-man show, and the highlight of the event was the DCW (dining chair wood) and the DCM (dining chair metal). This was the same year Ilmari Tapiovaara designed his stacking chair. By 1958 the Cherner chair had streamlined seat, post and back into one piece while keeping the tapered legs typical of the other chairs.

Plywood fell out of vogue during the 1960s and 1970s, but it was reintroduced by British designer Jasper Morrison in the 1980s. His 2009 BAC is a perfect example of combining design elements of two or more dissimilar styles. The BAC is a plywood chair with a center back post that manages to look very much like the chairs with tall legs and wraparound arms that were the subject of my initial post in this series. To me it could be the offspring of Wegner's The Chair and the Eames DCW. It definitely blurs the lines between the two categories.

From modernfurnitureclassics.com

The Molded Plywood Chair with the Single Post Back

Ilmari Tapiovaara - 1946
chictip.com

Eames DCW - 1946
moma.org

Thonet  - 1950s
nyshowplace.com

Norman Cherner, 1958
1stdibs.com

Jasper Morrison's BAC
hivemodern.com

Norman Cherner

Norman Cherner (1920-1987) studied at the Columbia University and later taught there in the Fine Arts Department. He was also an instructor at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1947-1949, where he explored the Bauhaus concept of multidisciplinary design. While he is best known for his furniture, he also designed graphics, glassware and lighting, as well as prefabricated housing.

One of the first pre-fabricated houses in the United States was Cherner's "Pre-built". It was designed, produced and assembled in 1957 for the U.S. Department of Housing. After being exhibited in Vienna it was shipped back to Connecticut to become his first home and studio outside of New York City.

Norman Cherner's furniture designs include a modular storage system, the "Konwiser Line" of furniture and lighting and molded plywood seating for Plycraft which he designed in 1958. The molded plywood "Cherner Chair" became his most recognized design and is found in furniture collections worldwide.

When Cherner presented his design for the famous chair to Plycraft, he was told it was impractical to produce, yet six months later, he saw the chair on a showroom floor attributed to a designer named "Bernardo," who was a creation of the Plycraft marketing department. Cherner sued Plycraft and won. As a result of the legal actions, the chair is sometimes attributed to the fictitious Bernardo, to Cherner, and even to Paul Goldman, the founder of Plycraft. The chair appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in a Norman Rockwell illustration, so it is sometimes even referred to as the "Rockwell Chair."

If you'd like to see a beautiful Cherner chair restoration, see my Toshmahal post about Dallas furniture restorer/refinisher Hank Tosh.  He brought a badly abused chair back to life.

From chernerchair.com, designaddict.com and dwr.com

Cherner armchair

furniture.architecture.sk

Cherner armchairs and side chairs

chernerchair.com

Cherner upholstered chair

chairblog.eu

Cherner iron and maple chair

1stdibs.com

Cherner iron and walnut tables

1stdibs.com

Cherner barstools

eventlucky.com