Folded Beauty

Autumn Exhibition
8.9.2010 - 23.1.2011
Press Release June 2010

General Press information

Imperial Furniture Collection
Schloß Schönbrunn Kultur- und Betriebsges.m.b.H.
press information

Kitchen and dining room furniture

SW - kitchen furniture, c. 1958/60

During the Second World War numerous apartments and houses were destroyed in bombing raids. After 1945 there was a shortage of housing and food was rationed. Subsidised by foreign donations, the city of Vienna reinstated the social housing programme of the interwar years. However, furniture was in very short supply.

The city of Vienna together with the federation of Austrian trade unions and the Chamber of Economics therefore joined forces to found the Soziale Wohnkultur [sozial living] project to produce and distribute reasonably-priced, high-quality furniture in modern designs for broad sections of the public.

In 1956 the first SW furniture catalogue was published which also featured a programme of kitchen furniture designed for the rather cramped conditions in municipal housing apartments blocks. A special stool called Connexi was designed for kitchen seating and available in a three- or four-legged model.

The second SW furniture catalogue of 1958 featured modern fitted kitchen units offered in a range of colours. These pastel colour schemes were typical of the new, upbeat attitude to lilfe in the years following the signing of Austrian State Treaty in 1955. They were also used for the Daisy tableware produced by the Lower Austrian company of Lilien Porzellan from 1959.

Also on display in this room is a set of kitchen furniture dating from1930/32. In the interwar period most people still had their kitchen furniture custom-made by a cabinet-maker or carpenter. A typical example is the wooden, white-painted kitchen furniture commissioned by Johanna and Josef Lichtl around 1932 for their small house in Leopoldau, Vienna.

Displayed opposite this is a dining room suite by Carl Witzmann.
Carl Witzmann designed this suite in cherry with mounts of enamelled white metal for the 1905 exhibitoin held by the Vienna Association of Arts and Crafts. It was made by the Karl Vogel cabinet-makers' workshop in Vienna´s fifth municipal district.
This suite was featured as an exemplary design in a report on the exhibition published in 1905 in Das Interieur, a journal dedicated to the arts and crafts.

Consisting of a large and small sideboard, an extending dining table and six dining chairs, this ensemble was puchased at the exhibition by the Viennese ceramic artist Hugo Franz Kirsch (1973 - 1961). It came from the artist´s villa and estate.