#HTE

VAM Shows You How Marcel Breuer’s Short Chair is Molded

Marcel Breuer designed his Long Chair and Short Chair for the Isokon Furniture Company way back in the 1930s. This year the UK’s Victoria and Albert Museum brought their cameras into the Isokon Plus workshop in London, to show you how the Short Chair’s main component is built today. Check out the nifty glue roller they use in place of what was probably, in Breuer’s day, a paintbrush:

The process is cool to watch, but I’m a little bummed that they didn’t show how they cut the shape out after tracing the pattern onto it with the template; I imagine that had to be the biggest hassle in the entire process.

How do you reckon they did it? My guess is that they have a second template, mark both sides and then use a handheld jigsaw, and that they have to keep stopping the cut and flipping the piece over to ensure they’re always cutting on a “hill” rather than a “valley,” and then a bunch of tedious sanding to get to the lines. 

Then again that does sound very inefficient. Maybe they’ve got some proprietary process and that’s why they’re not showing it to us?