Furniture for a Country Without Homes
In 1949 a poster in Stuttgart showed a plain wooden chair with a red cushion, dotted in white, and on the cushion a black cat, curled up and asleep. It asked a question: Wie wohnen? How should we live? It is a gentle image for a hard subject. In western Germany some five million homes were missing, and the exhibition behind the poster, which opened at the Landesgewerbemuseum in Stuttgart on 2 December 1949, set out to answer the question for people who would have to live in fewer and smaller rooms than before. It was arranged by an architect from Berlin, then 39 years old, named Herbert Hirche.
Hirche has never been a household name. Born in Görlitz in 1910, he trained as a cabinetmaker before studying at the Bauhaus in Dessau and Berlin from 1930. When the school closed in 1933, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe took him into his office, where he worked for Mies and Lilly Reich until 1938. During the war he directed building works for Egon Eiermann, whose steel table frame has its own story in this journal in The Eiermann Table. After 1945 he worked under Hans Scharoun on plans for rebuilding Berlin. In 1952 he moved to Stuttgart as professor of interior design and furniture at the State Academy of Fine Arts, a post he held until 1975.
The exhibition was practical rather than visionary. In the entrance halls Hirche gathered new building methods, prefabricated stairs and windows, lightweight panels and proposals for reusing the rubble of bombed cities. In the great hall he built a storey of social housing at full scale: two small flats, one the mirror of the other, which visitors could look into through the windows or from the galleries above. One was furnished with pieces made specially for the show. Hirche fitted out the other with furniture that could already be bought in the shops. He later remembered being given a car and a driver by the economics ministry and spending days in the countryside around Stuttgart, visiting the workshops that were building furniture for the exhibition. The accompanying brochure was sober about the task: living as before the war would not be possible for a long time, so the question was how to live healthily and comfortably in fewer and smaller rooms.
Hirche also looked back. He showed tubular steel chairs from the 1920s, among them the MR 515 and the B 32, as a reference to the Werkbund exhibition Die Wohnung of 1927, where the cantilevered chairs of Mies and Mart Stam had caused a sensation on the Weissenhof hill above the same city. The question itself was borrowed too; Wie wohnen? had already appeared on Willi Baumeister's poster for that exhibition. What had changed since then was the tone. In 1927 the new dwelling was a cause. In 1949, drawn by the graphic designer Hanns Lohrer on a sturdy chair by Adolf Schneck, it was a cat asleep on a cushion.
The cat says something the photographs of the period do not. Hirche's work has been handed down almost entirely in black and white, and those pictures have fixed his reputation for restraint, objectivity and a quiet palette. Historic colour photographs of his own home in Stuttgart tell a different story. The foam cushions of his low armchairs were covered in green, red and violet, and most of the steel furniture he built for himself in the academy workshops had frames sprayed dark red, dark blue or petrol blue. His restraint was real, but in his own rooms it came in colour.
The restraint was real, but it was never colourless.
Among those pieces was a deep, low armchair, built in 1953 in the academy workshops for his own home. The construction is plain to read. A length of steel tube is bent at right angles rather than in the sweeping curves of the 1920s, and it carries two separate upholstered planes, one for the seat and one for the back, set at a reclining angle close to the floor. The right angle matters. It gives the chair the same architectural logic as Hirche's shelving and his interiors, where lines meet squarely and nothing is decorative. The chair was published in Gerd Hatje's survey new furniture in 1955. In 1957 Hirche placed it in his model apartment at the Interbau exhibition in Berlin's Hansaviertel, hoping a manufacturer would take it on, and in 1964 it was shown at documenta III in Kassel. It nevertheless remained a prototype for decades.
Series production came only decades later, when the Stuttgart manufacturer Richard Lampert made it for Hirche's ninetieth birthday. Today the Herbert Hirche Lounge Chair is made with covers in textile, leather or cowhide, with a matching stool.
Hirche's shelving had an easier start. In 1954 Christian Holzäpfel, who had joined his father's joinery in the small town of Ebhausen in 1951, asked him for a light and flexible shelf as an alternative to String, the Swedish system by Nils and Kajsa Strinning. The result, the DHS 10 of 1954, hangs shelves, cabinets and back panels between ladders of steel tube. Unlike String it does not depend on a wall. Its cabinets were veneered on every side so that the shelf could stand free in a room, and Hirche often used it that way, as a room divider. The black back panels stiffened the structure and gave it its graphic character, and the cross rungs, set strictly at right angles, made it more architectural than its Swedish model. Within months of its launch Mia Seeger chose pieces of the programme for the German model apartment at the H 55 exhibition in Helsingborg.
Richard Lampert reissued the system in 2019. It is available as an open DHS 10 Shelf and as a low sideboard, and the original idea survives in both: a few standard parts that can be rearranged as a household changes, rather than a piece of furniture that dictates how a room is used.
In 1956 Hirche added a bar trolley to the Holzäpfel range, sold under the name FAR. Two sheets of glass, ribbed on one side, sit in a frame of angle iron sprayed black. The upper sheet is shorter than the lower one, so that tall bottles can stand on the lower sheet beside it. It is the kind of detail that only becomes visible in use, which is perhaps the best description of his work as a whole.
Hirche died in Heidelberg in 2002, at the age of 91. His estate is held by the Werkbundarchiv in Berlin, which notes that he wanted his buildings, interiors and furniture not to dominate the lives of the people who used them, but to leave them as much freedom as possible. It is a modest answer to the question on the poster of 1949, and an enduring one. A room needs a chair low enough to rest in, a shelf that can move with its owner, and space left over. The cat, it seems, understood this first.
Images: Courtesy of Richard Lampert
