Searching for the Gothic in Ikea
Michael Thonet was approaching middle age when he presented his system of laminated veneers to the Emperor of Austria-Hungry. Already a successful cabinet maker, Thonet had spent the better part of the 1830’s experimenting with ways to bend wood, thinking that were he to succeed, he would have the means to mass produce attractive, inexpensive furniture. He was right. The Emperor’s approval led to a patent, and, by the time war broke out in 1914, Thonet’s 7000 factory workers were producing 1.9 million pieces per year ¹. The most successful of these pieces is listed in the MOMA as ‘Chair №14’. Chair №14, or ‘Viennese coffee house chair’, is a fixture of the European town square. It is certainly elegant: the steam-bent wood twists into the same geometric shapes found in the neo-classical, baroque, and Victorian ². It has aged well: throughout his career, the 20th century architect Le Corbusier only used Thonet furniture in the homes he designed, stating that ‘never before has anything been created more elegant or better in its conception, more precise in its execution, or more excellently functional’ ³.
Thonet’s chairs were shipped disassembled in pallets of 36. Each chair consisted of 6 pieces of bent wood and 10 screws, which a note on the underside of each chair advises the café owner to tighten regularly. The lightness, elegance, and functionality of Thonet’s chairs, along with a canny marketing campaign, ensured an unassuming place in our cafe’s and homes.
Chair №14, however, signified a deeper shift in society. Though the Emperor of Austria-Hungry was impressed by Thonet’s innovations, Thonet was not designing for the old European aristocracy. He had in mind, rather, the sensibilities of the newly monied middle class. The merchants and bankers of the old Hapsburg Empire shared the aristocratic love of biomorphic and vegetal forms, but also demanded that their pieces by identical and uniform. The eccentricities of the Arts and Craft movement were both uneconomical and unfashionable: beauty was symmetrical and reasoned. Three years before Thonet received his patent, critic, artist, and social commentator John Ruskin found the best way to articulate this change was through Greek and Gothic architecture.
By the time the children of the European aristocracy, months into the requisite ‘Grand Tour’, stumbled upon the temples of Greece, Corinthian columns had been in the popular imagination a shorthand for the nobler parts of human nature. These tours cemented idea that the Pantheon was the embodiment of Hellenistic reason, and the Theatre of Dionysus the source of artistic sensibilities. By contrast, the Gothic architecture of their native Northern Europe seemed crude and simple. In a twisting passage, Ruskin describes Gothic style as a reflection of the character of men who ‘must break the rock for bread, and cleave the forest for fire’; of tribes who live where the ‘earth heave into mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy moor’ ⁴. In this account, Gothic architecture is rude and brash, its buildings hewn from the very sinews of Creation. Its buildings certainly give that impression. Windows appear with organic necessity, and gargoyles often seem like just a nub of rock in which, by chance, you can just about make out a face.
Like those who passed afternoons on Thonet’s chairs, the ancient Greeks saw beauty in cool logic and uniformity. The best artisans of Athens were those who were able to efface their touch from that which they built. A Gothic building, on the other hand, is a record of hundreds, if not thousands, of choices made by its creator. It is a trace that someone wanted this particular fold in the world to be creased in this way and not that. A Gothic church contains ‘freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters can secure’ ⁵. In the Greek style, buildings were washed clean of the fingerprints of those that built them: in the Gothic they were etched into the stone.
Like the 19th century bourgeoisie, we have a love of the perfect and the orderly. The differences in each of Ikea’s ‘Billy’ bookshelves lie at the molecular level; a Big Mac in Paris is a Big Mac in Istanbul. Where we perhaps differ from the Victorians is that we also expect evidence of humanness in what we consume. We carry a vague nostalgia for the artisanal: for stripped back wood and chipped pottery, for a time when Sunday markets were necessary and not an ornamental feature of our week. Sometimes we find these pangs attended to in the studied messiness of the otherwise perfect. The handwritten chalk messages in the world’s Starbucks, for instance, mean that for a moment we feel like we are consuming something that is not governed by corporate policy. Likewise, the woman at the till in McDonalds smiles at you, and posters on the walls make it clear that to consume a Big Mac is to also consume friendship.
Despite what the mismatched cutlery and whimsical cocktails would lead you to believe, the hands making a hamburger in an international chain are governed by a set of procedures. The hands making our phones move in the same ‘exquisitely timed palsy’ ⁶ of Ruskin’s bead makers, and the bodies filling orders at ‘fulfilment centres’ move with a dead-eyed mania. In heavy prose Ruskin admonished 19th century Britain for allowing their love of the perfect to cauterize the noblest parts of human nature. Even though we quietly nurture a love for measured idiosyncrasies, we too expect standardised perfection. When real humanness rudely ignores the charade and tumbles into our lives, however, we are the first to be indignant. We become flushed when there is no one day delivery option, for instance, or when the coffee comes a bit too hot, or the sales assistant is bit too brusque in her replies.
‘You must either make a tool out of the creature, or a man. You cannot make both’ ⁷
I am a hypocrite to write this. My apartment is strewn with the fruits of Ikea and Habitat: flicking through images of sultry-lit lifestyle porn is its own sugary rush. I find the standardised haloumi wraps of ‘Leon’ reassuring, and I am at once cynical and appreciative of their self-referentially authentic décor. You will also find two modern versions of Thonet’s chair at my kitchen table. We should be outraged about things like the working conditions of sweatshops or the pay of fast foods workers. At the same time, we should reflect on what should be valued in work. If we are to learn anything from Ruskin, Morris, Marx, or any of those who wrote in the bawling infancy of industrial society, it is to value human imperfection over mechanical perfection. To search for the signs of deliberation: the small window in the tower or the misshapen gargoyle. To not be content by displays of humanness but to insist on the thing itself in all its brashness.
These ideas are taken from an essay called ‘The Nature of Gothic’, from John Ruskin’s book ‘The Stones of Venice’. The Project Guttenburg version can be found here.
¹ Kyriazidou, E. and Pesendorfer, M., 1999. Viennese chairs: a case study for modern industrialization. The Journal of Economic History, 59(1), pp.143–166.
² Kertemelidou, P., 2018. Exhibiting an everyday industrial object in the museum the case of Thonet №14 chair. Museum Management and Curatorship, 33(2), pp.136–145.
³ Wilhide, E. and Anderson, R. (2010). How to design a chair. London: Conran Octopus in association with Design Museum. p. 30
⁴ Ruskin, J. (2014). On art and life. New York: Penguin Books. p. 10
⁵ Ibid, p. 16
⁶ Ibid, p. 20
⁷ Ibid, p. 14
