Politicization of the Chaises Sandows

The politicization of an object requires the construction of associations between that object or its dominant qualities with political ideals deemed valuable by its audience. To politicize the Chaises Sandows, Herbst used exhibitions, speeches, articles, and a group manifesto to associate its method of manufacture, materials, and aesthetics with the ideal of an equitable society. His argument hung on the proposition that all inequalities would dissipate when everyone enjoyed healthy and comfortable living conditions. Inequalities and all unpleasantness, according to Herbst, stem from low living standards. At a speech in 1932, Herbst stated,

The day slums are replaced by healthy housing, there will be no more discontent. When everyone can rest after a day’s work and enjoy a healthy family life, there will be no more need of newspapers because there will be nothing to report. Goodbye murder, goodbye theft–one cannot burgle a well-lit house, a house in which all the doors are open, and everything can be seen.⁹

Herbst established a direct connection between living quarters, a family’s happiness, and social wellbeing. If everyone lives in a clean, adequate space, they have nothing to lack. Herbst identified that lack as the cause of unhappiness and the reason people currently cause social strife. To reach this goal of outfitting everyone with sufficient housing, Herbst turned to industrial methods and manufacturing.

Herbst prescribed the use of the Chaises Sandows at a moment of postwar reconstruction, urbanization, and financial struggles. The constraints created by lack of space and finances figured prominently in his work. He writes,

Our need for comfort has grown but the space we have at our disposal has decreased. We no longer possess the right, nor the means, to waste space for purely decorative effects. Luxurious great halls already belong to the past; the installation of small rooms (that is, those best adapted to an increasing number of needs in progressively limited surfaces)–this is the specifically modern problem.¹⁰

This increased need for comfort due to a perceived increasingly hectic urban life placed Herbst within middle- and upper-class concerns about degrading urban conditions. Herbst offered the Chaises Sandows–composed of steel, manufactured series, and without ornament or cushions–to address poor and disparate living conditions.

Herbst discussed mass production and steel as critical components to producing affordable, healthy, and comfortable interiors. He outlined this position in the article implications of a Mass-Production Context.” Industrial materials, such as steel, form hygienic interiors because they are without textiles, crevices, or cracks. They, therefore, do not accumulate dust or dirt and are easily cleaned. Industrial materials also facilitate the seamless use of mass production, which, through series production and duplication, decreases the expense of manufacturing durable furniture. Herbst summarized the importance of mass production by writing, “Mass production offers to all (socially) a potential for comfort unimaginable without it. It is this search for improvements in human living standards that urges us forward to mass production.”¹¹ Mass production was not merely a manufacturing process, and steel was not only a building mate-rial. They were avenues to an equal society.

Herbst celebrated the sleek aesthetic of the Chaises Sandows as contributing to social improvement. The chairs, as smooth industrial objects free of ornament, resisted dust and dirt, required a minimal amount of space, and lacked status symbolism. Herbst often complained about decoration and applied ornament. He stated his position clearly in a speech, saying, “We can no longer live amid bric-à-brac. We should clear it out–de-furnish.”¹² Herbst charged ornament with taking up precious space and increasing the difficulty of cleaning–two severe charges in his quest to manu­facture sanitary homes affordable to all. Historicist ornament and monarchical styles reaffirmed class positions, even in manufactured copies. The use of such furniture sustained the memory of royal hierarchies and contributed to the notion that only a particular style of furniture belonged in specific types of rooms. The Chaises Sandows fit any room for whatever occasion because they were well-designed chairs. According to Herbst, the material, manufacture, and style of the Chaises Sandows made them appropriate for every person on any occasion. Herbst went so far as to display Chaises Sandows in a model music room at the first Union 5'8 Artistes Modernes salon of 1930.

Despite Herbst’s efforts to politicize the Chaises Sandows, his primary audience did not register his arguments. Art critics that attended and reviewed decorative arts exhibitions focused instead on the materials of the Chaises Sandows. The use of steel and rubber preoccupied most of them for most of the interwar period. When Mobilier et Décoration reported on the Paris atelier of Tamara de Lempicka, the critic Georges Rémon’s only statement about the twelve Chaises Sandows on display was a comparison between the chairs and the electric radiator based on their shared materials.¹³ At the third salon of the Union des Artistes Modernes, Georges Valois wrote about Herbst’s display as an aesthetic fashion for metal that will “pass, like so many others.”¹⁴ The following year, at the U.A.M. salon fourth edition, René Drouin wrote for L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, 'Te seats in chrome tubes with bungees, an ingenious solution... which was enter­taining.”¹⁵ (Fig. 3) Toward the end of the decade, the critic Gaston Derys praised Herbst’s 'chrome steel armchairs, the backs of which are trimmed with rubber cords,” as “malleable and practical.”¹⁶ Derys described Herbst’s entire career in terms of his material: “More than ten years ago, René Herbst told us about his faith in metal furniture, which in his eyes remains the furniture of the future.”¹⁷ This lack of recognition highlights the fact that politicization occurs outside the materiality of the object in question. While Herbst used the Chaises Sandows in his arguments, the material objects did not act as conduits. There exists no guarantee that the people who encounter that object most often will register politicization.¹⁸ Politicization is avoidable. Design politics, however, are not.

Design politics of the Chaises Sandows

Because design politics refers to the inherent interac­tions of material objects with systems and entities that distribute power within a society, an investigation into a specific object’s design politics involves studying materials, technologies, makers, and institutions involved in its creation. The list of systems and entities involved in the creation of Chaises Sandows is there­fore long. It includes national governments and local administrations; international economic agreements; the industrial capabilities in France and Germany; the loss of life, physical destruction, and technological developments caused by the First World War; and an unknowable number of people who participated in the manufacture of the materials and final products. Most of these systems appear in an analysis of the object’s material history.

The rubber at the center of the Chaises Sandows bungees originated on colonial plantations in Southeast Asia.¹⁹ Each bungee cord contained natural vulcanized rubber encircled by a cotton textile with metal hooks on each end. The Hevea brasiliensis plantations in the region now called Vietnam produced 420,046 out of 65,85 tons of rubber used in Europe in 1919 alone.²⁰ Rubber plantations replaced dense jungles with grids of Hevea and associated production facilities. (Fig. 1) The labor of clearing, planting, and harvesting this land fell to men contracted by the plantations. Most of these men were indigenous to continental Southeast Asia and overwhelmingly poor.²¹ By the early 1920s, rubber plantations employed an estimated 18,000 men.²² These men often traveled from northern towns. Plan­tations paid their moving expenses in exchange for three-year labor contracts that stipulated salaries two-hundred times smaller than a European overseer’s salary.²³ Their workdays lasted according to daylight– they often worked from six in the morning, when harvesting proved easiest, to six in the evening. During the dry seasons, they cleared the land in preparation for future plantings. They harvested and processed latex in the wet season. After collecting latex pails, men filtered it, mixed it with coagulants, and pressed the viscous rubber into sheets. They then aggressively worked sulfur into the mixture and heated it to about io degrees Celsius. (Fig. 4)

Strenuous labor, harsh working conditions, and violent managers characterized the lives of the indigenous people who worked and lived on the plantations. Each plantation had a central compound organized in the image of the global colonial society.²⁴ The compounds included living and working facilities for those who labored in the production of rubber and for European administrators. According to the sociologist Martin Murray, the compounds resembled prison-like enclosures where laborers’ lives were highly regulated and separated from the outside world.²⁵ The working areas included storage structures, garages, repair shops, laboratories, electrical power houses, and the equipment for the early stages of processing rubber. Indigenous people working on the plantations lived in residential complexes made of brick or wood, with roofs of tiles or corrugated iron.²⁶ (Fig. 5) In these low buildings, called trai, dozens of people slept side by side in stall-like enclosures. Beginning in the late 1920s, when the number of female workers increased, dwellings for small groups with attached vegetable gardens replaced some of the trai.²⁷ These mud-and-thatch dwellings housed three or four unmarried men and a woman who performed domestic responsibilities.²⁸ About one hundred of these groups formed a single village.²⁹ The structures designated for European employees stood apart from the trais, villages, and processing facilities. These facilities included managerial offices, stone houses, police headquarters, detention buildings, and hospitals. (Fig. 6)

Management devised an array of tactics to keep indigenous men and women compliant and productive. As Murray explains, “[European management] made use of intimidation, harassment, and physical violence in order to squeeze labor-time out of direct producers.”³⁰ Management fined the indigenous people for breaking a code of conduct in minor or non-existent ways.

Deductions from wages could be made for putative wastefulness, carelessness with tools, working slowly, feigned illness, self-inflicted injuries, impudence, and insubordination. Such infractions came with beatings, floggings with leather whips, and other sorts of physical abuse.³¹ European managers used private prisons in the compounds to incarcerate indigenous workers for alleged infractions, such as refusing to work, destroying a part of plantation property, or attempts to escape with unpaid debt. These violent practices produced high mortality rates. In 1928, the year before Chaises Sandows went into production, the mortality rate across French plantations reached 5.4 percent–double of the region’s average mortality rate. The large size of plantations, the lack of outside legal support, and the perpetual indebtedness of indigenous people to their European managers left few options for escape. The Chaises Sandows would not have been possible without these colonial dependencies.

The Chaises Sandows’ other most prominent feature, the steel frames, originated in northeastern France, a region shaped by unstable national borders and international conflict. The administrative district of Lorraine produced the vast majority of steel in interwar France. The Lorraine Basin is home to vast deposits of Minette, iron ore with an iron content that varies from 20 to 40 percent and contains a relatively high level of phosphorus and other extraneous elements.³² When Germany released Alsace-Lorraine to France in 1919, the land included between 150,000 acres and 180,000 acres of active Minette mines that contained three billion metric tons of ore with one billion metric tons of iron content.³³ The Thomas basic process offered, for the first time, an efficient way to process ore with this level of phosphorus. Lorraine produced 95 percent of the total ore production in the metropole and processed 78 percent of the country’s pig iron, 70 percent of its crude steel, and 60 percent of its finished steel.³⁴

Mines and steelworks employed men who immigrated from Eastern Europe to perform strenuous labor. After mass casualties in France during World War I, the national government and large corporations encour­aged and facilitated the immigration of men from Eastern Europe. Mines recruited workers from Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Czech Republic and arranged their transportation to France to keep up with ore production.³⁵ They mined ore by hand with the aid of gunpowder.³⁶ They then hauled the ore to the surface in horse-drawn wagons and later by electric locomotives.³⁷ Landslides, fires, and collapses were common hazards.³⁸ The villages around the mine pits failed to accommodate the new immigrants, though employers promised to provide new employees with permanent housing. Their construction failed to keep pace with employment numbers, so immigrant workers lived in barracks made of wood and mud for several years. Employees had little autonomy, as employers refused to bargain collectively with workers. The materials and means of production that went into rubber and steel embedded these histories of indigenous and immigrant workers, of exploitation and dehumanization sanctioned by the French colonial system into the Chaises Sandows.

Conclusion: Synthesising design politics and politicization

This overview of Herbst’s rhetoric and brief material history highlights the spaces between the politicization and design politics of the Chaises Sandows. Herbst promoted hygienic and secure housing for everyone; however, the conditions of those living in Southeast Asia and Northeast France who were involved in producing the materials of which the Chaises Sandows were made were far from ideal. Rather than encouraging equal standards of living and dissolving class differences, the production of the Chaises Sandows reinforced established hierarchies. Herbst’s attempt to distribute the chairs at affordable rates never came to pass, and his clients remained wealthy Parisians. Industrialists like Pierre Peissi and the Schneider family paid high prices to display Chaises Sandows in their homes prominently. The sleek chairs occupied spaces of privilege and exemplified new applications of the industrialist’s steel. Herbst’s primary audience may not have recorded his politicization, but the materiality of the Chaises Sandows operates as a record of their design politics.

These dichotomies are not unique to Herbst. For modernist designers that believed furniture could create a better world, a schism typically existed between politicization and design politics. Such lofty goals depend on sweeping changes to entrenched global systems. However, this case study of the Chaises Sandows exemplifies how modernist designers often fulfilled their politicization promises on a limited scale, if at all. Such designers focused on wealthy, urban, Euro­pean consumers and afforded this slim demographic the privilege of individuality and a comfortable life in egalitarian societies run on democratic ideals. This fortunate group–and the lack of consideration for others–is an entrenched aspect of modern capitalism. This history of the Chaises Sandows highlights this aspect of design politics and politicisation, which remains relevant today.

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