Eisengarn, meaning "iron yarn" in English, is a light-reflecting, strong, waxed-cotton thread. It was invented and manufactured in Germany in the mid-19th century, but is now best known for its use in cloth woven for the tubular-steel chairs designed by Marcel Breuer while he was a teacher at the Bauhaus design school.
The yarn is also known as Glanzgarn ('gloss' or 'glazed' yarn). [1]
Despite the name, there is no iron in Eisengarn. The name refers to its strength and metallic shine. It is made by soaking cotton threads in a starch and paraffin wax solution. The threads are dried and then stretched and polished by steel rollers and brushes. The end result of the process is a lustrous, tear-resistant yarn which is extremely hardwearing. [2] [3]
The Eisengarn manufacturing process was invented in the mid-19th century in a factory in Barmen, now part of the city of Wuppertal, east of the river Rhine. [2]
It was used as a sewing thread and for making lace, shoe laces, hat strings, ribbons, lining materials and in the cable industry. [2]
The manufacture of the yarn gave a considerable boost to the textile industry of Barmen and the surrounding region. By 1875, the Wuppertal company Barthels & Feldhoff employed more than 300 people in Eisengarn production. [2]
In 1927 the weaver and textile designer Margaretha Reichardt (1907–1984), then a student at the Bauhaus design school, experimented and improved the quality of the thread and developed cloth and strapping material made from Eisengarn for use on Marcel Breuer's tubular steel chairs, such as the Wassily Chair. [4] [5]
Light-weight tubular steel seating was also used in aircraft seating in the 1930s and Reichardt's improved version of Eisengarn was used as a covering for the seats. [6] [7]
A more prosaic use for the strong Eisengarn was, and still is, for making colourful string shopping bags, which were popular in the former East Germany, and are now an Ostalgie item. [8] When the bag is not in use, the nature of the Eisengarn enables it to be compressed so that it takes up very little space. [9]
Erfurt is the capital and largest city in the Central German state of Thuringia. It is located in the wide valley of the Gera river, in the southern part of the Thuringian Basin, north of the Thuringian Forest. It sits in the middle of an almost straight line of cities consisting of the six largest Thuringian cities forming the central metropolitan corridor of the state, the "Thuringian City Chain" with more than 500,000 inhabitants, stretching from Eisenach in the west, via Gotha, Erfurt, Weimar and Jena, to Gera in the east. Erfurt and the city of Göttingen in southern Lower Saxony are the two cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants closest to the geographic center of Germany. Erfurt is located 100 km (62 mi) south-west of Leipzig, 250 km (155 mi) north-east of Frankfurt, 300 km (186 mi) south-west of Berlin and 400 km (249 mi) north of Munich.
St. Hedwig's Cathedral is a Catholic church on Bebelplatz in the historic centre of Berlin. Dedicated to Hedwig of Silesia, it was erected from 1747 to 1887 by order of Frederick the Great according to plans by Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff in Baroque style. Damaged during the Allied bombing in World War II, the cathedral of the Archdiocese of Berlin was restored from 1952 to 1963 in post-war modernist style as part of the Forum Fridericianum. Since 2018, the listed building has been closed for renovation.
The Wassily Chair, also known as the Model B3 chair, was designed by Marcel Breuer in 1925–1926 while he was the head of the cabinet-making workshop at the Bauhaus, in Dessau, Germany.
Marcel Lajos Breuer, was a Hungarian-German modernist architect and furniture designer. He moved to the United States in 1937 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1944.
A cantilever chair is a chair whose seating and framework are not supported by the typical arrangement of 4 legs, but instead is held erect and aloft by a single leg or legs that are attached to one end of a chair's seat and bent in an L shape, thus also serving as the chair's supporting base. Nearly a century after its inception, tubular steel remains the prime choice for the cantilever chair with Marcel Breuer being perhaps the greatest champion of this design technique; using the overhanging cantilever styling in both his furniture and architecture. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto are other historical figures who contributed to the popularity of the cantilever chair.
The London-based Isokon firm was founded in 1929 by the English entrepreneur Jack Pritchard and the Canadian architect Wells Coates to design and construct modernist houses and flats, and furniture and fittings for them. Originally called Wells Coates and Partners, the name was changed in 1931 to Isokon, a name derived from Isometric Unit Construction, bearing an allusion to Russian Constructivism.
Mart Stam was a Dutch architect, urban planner, and furniture designer. Stam was extraordinarily well-connected, and his career intersects with important moments in the history of 20th-century European architecture, including the invention of the cantilever tubular chair, teaching at the Bauhaus, contributions to the Weissenhof Estate, the Van Nelle Factory,, buildings for Ernst May's New Frankfurt housing estates, followed by work in the USSR with the idealistic May Brigade, to teaching positions in Amsterdam and post-war East Germany. Upon return to the Netherlands he contributed to postwar reconstruction and finally retired,, in Switzerland, where he died.
Modern furniture refers to furniture produced from the late 19th century through the present that is influenced by modernism. Post-World War II ideals of cutting excess, commodification, and practicality of materials in design heavily influenced the aesthetic of the furniture. It was a tremendous departure from all furniture design that had gone before it. There was an opposition to the decorative arts, which included Art Nouveau, Neoclassical, and Victorian styles. Dark or gilded carved wood and richly patterned fabrics gave way to the glittering simplicity and geometry of polished metal. The forms of furniture evolved from visually heavy to visually light. This shift from decorative to minimalist principles of design can be attributed to the introduction of new technology, changes in philosophy, and the influences of the principles of architecture. As Philip Johnson, the founder of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art articulates:
"Today industrial design is functionally motivated and follows the same principles as modern architecture: machine-like simplicity, smoothness of surface, avoidance of ornament ... It is perhaps the most fundamental contrast between the two periods of design that in 1900 the Decorative Arts possessed ..."
The manufacture of textiles is one of the oldest of human technologies. To make textiles, the first requirement is a source of fiber from which a yarn can be made, primarily by spinning. The yarn is processed by knitting or weaving, which turns yarn into cloth. The machine used for weaving is the loom. For decoration, the process of colouring yarn or the finished material is dyeing. For more information of the various steps, see textile manufacturing.
The jumping jack is a jointed, flat wooden figure, a cross between a puppet and a paper doll that is considered a mechanical toy. The figure's joints are connected to a pull string that causes the arms and legs move up and down when the string is pulled and released. Jumping jacks were popular in many contemporary countries including England, France, and Germany, but similar mechanical toys date back to the Ancient Egyptians.
Gunta Stölzl was a German textile artist who played a fundamental role in the development of the Bauhaus school's weaving workshop, where she created enormous change as it transitioned from individual pictorial works to modern industrial designs. She was one of a small number of female teachers on the Bauhaus' staff and the first to hold the title of "Master".
Novelty yarns include a wide variety of yarns made with unusual features, structure or fiber composition such as slubs, inclusions, metallic or synthetic fibers, laddering and varying thickness introduced during production. Some linens, wools to be woven into tweed, and the uneven filaments of some types of silk are allowed to retain their normal irregularities, producing the characteristic uneven surface of the finished fabric. Man-made fibres, which can be modified during production, are especially adaptable for special effects such as crimping and texturizing.
Metal furniture is furniture made with metal parts: iron, carbon steel, aluminium, brass and stainless steel.
The ADGB Trade Union School, is a training centre complex in Bernau bei Berlin, Germany. It was built for the former General German Trade Union Federation, from 1928 to 1930. It is a textbook example of Bauhaus functionalist architecture, both in the finished product and in the analytical and collaborative approach used to develop the design and complete the project. Next to the Bauhaus Dessau building, it was the second-largest project ever undertaken by the Bauhaus.
Lace machines took over the commercial manufacture of lace during the nineteenth century.
Margaretha Reichardt, also known as Grete Reichardt, was a textile artist, weaver, and graphic designer from Erfurt, Germany. She was one of the most important designers to emerge from the Bauhaus design school's weaving workshop in Dessau, Germany. She spent most of her adult life running her own independent weaving workshop in Erfurt, which was under Nazi rule and then later part of communist East Germany.
Torin Building is a heritage-listed former factory and now factory and office space located at 26 Coombes Drive in the western Sydney suburb of Penrith in the City of Penrith local government area of New South Wales, Australia. It was designed by Marcel Breuer and built from 1975 to 1976. It is also known as the Former Torin Corporation Building and Breuer Building. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 15 May 2009.
Friedrich Konrad Püschel was a German architect, town planner and university professor who was educated at the Bauhaus design school. He worked in East Germany, the Soviet Union and North Korea.
Clemens Julius Mangner, often C. J. Mangner in abbreviated form, was a German architect who worked in his home town of Bonn and in what is now Wuppertal.
