to contact him several times by mail, without success. It was one of the reviews of the Wickerwork show that Pieck’s sister had happened upon. So we sent the pictures and asked, of course, for Pieck’s address in Brazil. The ensuing correspondence over four years resulted in a visit from Pieck to the Netherlands in 2006, when he finally revealed the true story of the LAWO 1.
Han Pieck was born in 1923, in the north of Holland. His father, Henri, was an artist and notorious double agent for the British and Soviets. Pieck went to the Amsterdam School for Applied Arts (now the Rietveld Academy) where the famous Mart Stam, considered by many to be the designer, in 1926, of the first tubular steel cantilevered chair, was one of his most inspiring teachers. Stam taught Pieck to observe carefully, Pieck recalled. He had a progressive view on furniture and always exhorted his students to “make strong pieces with limited materials.” The T-46 bent plywood side table from 1946 by Hein Stolle, another of his students, is also a good example of Stam’s vision.
While a student in 1945, as German-occupied Holland was suffering through the Winter of Hunger, Pieck designed his stackable, laminated plywood lounge chair. After the war, in 1946, together with his friend Maarten van Raalte, a Fokker aircraft engineer, he succeeded in making a prototype. (Pieck and van Raalte thought that they had made the very first chair out of a single piece of plywood; with limited access to international publications, they were not aware that Gerald Summers in England had in fact beaten them to that achievement in 1934 with his lounge chair for Simple furniture. However, Summers used “ready-made” industrial plywood, while Pieck and van Raalte glued all the layers of veneer themselves.)
But how to raise money for production? Pieck approached F. Gribbling, a wealthy Jewish grain merchant of the company Gribbling and Verkley in Amsterdam, whose daughter he had helped hide during the war. The grateful businessman had told Pieck to contact him if he could ever be of help. Pieck went to see him and told him that because of the scarcity of money and raw materials, he needed a large order for a special government license to start a factory for his chair. Asked how big the order should be, Pieck smiled. “Oh, just 10,000 pieces,” he said. They went together to a lawyer, and Gribbling solemnly declared that he had ordered 10,000 chairs.

With this document, Pieck was able to apply for funding through the United States Marshall Plan, the economic program set up to help rebuild Europe after the war. He received 300,000 guilders, the equivalent of more than $1 million today. Together with van Raalte, Pieck built an 8,600 square foot factory he named LAWO (LAminated WOod), in Ommen, in northeast Holland. They bought a blue van, a hydraulic press and, from Philips Electronics, a 15 kilowatt generator — an exceptionally powerful one in those days. Then they started to build the mold themselves.
Unfortunately, production was delayed by six months while Pieck and van Raalte figured out how to heat the chair in the mold. They realized that different parts of the chair needed different power frequencies — the armrests needed less time to heat than the seats, for instance. After many experiments and wasted chairs, they solved that problem with the application of split electrodes and variable condensers that enabled them to control different frequencies simultaneously.

Pieck applied for patent rights in 17 countries for his chair design and other furniture made out of one piece of bent plywood. The patent rights included “the treatment of wooden objects with the help of high frequency alternating current-generated fields, and the application of this method.”

After six months, Pieck went back to Gribbling and told him that he was ready to start production of 50 chairs a day, assuming that he would want to market the chairs, but Gribbling responded, “Great. I helped you by getting the license to start the factory, but my business is grain, not chairs.” So Pieck went back to Ommen to try to market the chairs himself. Despite all their efforts, Pieck and van Raalte succeeded in selling only 1,500 LAWO 1 chairs, mostly to family, friends and a health institution where they were used on balconies. Of these 1,500 chairs, no more than 50 are known to still exist, most of them owned by collectors or on display in museums around the world.

Not surprisingly, the factory went bankrupt, the blue van was sold and Pieck moved to London where he installed high frequency generators for Fasswoods