CLOSE UP
Han Pieck’s
10,000 Chairs
By Wiet Hekking
Photography by kevin van der Brug
This is the amazing story of Han Pieck, a Dutch adventurer who, in 1945, designed the LAWO 1, a stackable lounge chair whose seat, back, arms and legs are crafted of a single piece of bent plywood.
This comfortable and innovative chair was shaped using a new method of high frequency wood laminating, and the chair was one of the first made with this technique. Previously, plywood chairs were made in molds in which glue had to harden for hours — a time consuming and expensive process. Using new types of glue, in combination with a high frequency electrical current that heated and conducted the glue very rapidly, this new technique reduced the time needed to bend the wood from seven hours to seven minutes.
Pieck supposedly sold 10,000 LAWO 1 chairs just after World War II — an incredible number in the Netherlands at that time, which counted just 10 million inhabitants. Then he went bankrupt, left Holland for England and, in 1951, moved to Brazil, where he still lives. Meanwhile his chair became a coveted classic and extremely hard to find.
It was not until 2002 that Pieck learned that his brief foray into furniture design had made such waves. Interviewed about his life and his now-famous chair, he revealed that he had, in fact, produced only 1,500 of them.
I got involved in this story in 2002, when Karrie-Ilja Pieck, Han’s sister, phoned WonderWood, the Amsterdam-based gallery specializing in plywood furniture that I have owned since 1999. In an article about WonderWood and plywood in a Dutch newspaper, she had noticed a photograph of her brother’s chair and asked for a copy of the photograph to send along with the article to her brother in Brazil. I was amazed.
I had bought my first LAWO 1 chair in 1988. Peter Vöge, a Dutch architect and co-author of the book Stoelen (Chairs), that featured Pieck’s chair on the cover, had written several articles about plywood in Dutch magazines, and from these, I learned more about plywood and about Pieck’s chair. One of Vöge’s articles stated that Pieck had sold 10,000 LAWO 1 chairs. I found it hard to believe that this had been possible just after the war when there was a scarcity of nearly everything, and normal sidechairs were far more in demand than lounge chairs.
As a collector of plywood, I liked the LAWO 1 chair so much that I gave it a prominent place in an exhibition about Dutch plywood that I initiated at the Wickerwork Museum in Noordwolde in 2002. The chair was even on the poster of the exhibition and attention was given to it in all the reviews of the show.
Meanwhile, living far away in South America, Pieck had lost touch with the Netherlands, as well as with European design. Vöge had tried
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