The furniture handbook, p.23
The Furniture Handbook, page 23
Cast Iron and Wrought Iron
Cast iron is a common material for fittings, brackets, garden furniture, and cooking pots. The material is robust, but the weight is such that it’s not used in large amounts, though it’s often used for parts and details in furniture and design. Outdoor furniture made of cast iron is solid and remains stable in the strongest winds, but it can be very heavy to move. It can withstand high temperatures and compression but is sensitive to knocks and blows. The difference between cast iron and wrought iron is mainly that cast iron has a higher carbon content. The lower carbon content makes wrought iron softer and easier to work.
Brass
Brass is one of our oldest alloys and is a mixture of copper and zinc. The more zinc there is in the brass, the more resistant to corrosion it is. The color can vary from whitish-yellow to reddish-brown, depending on the copper content. Brass is nonmagnetic. Since brass is easy to shape at low temperatures, does not rust, and is sufficiently hard to be milled and punched, cast, and welded, it is used for all kinds of things from mountings and door handles to lamps, candlesticks, jewelry, and plumbing products. Because of its glittering yellow color, brass used to be known as poor man’s gold.
Unless it is kept polished, brass will darken with time and pick up damp stains and fingermarks, but it is relatively easy to polish it back to looking like new. Brass details and fixtures are a little more demanding in that they need regular attention if they are to retain their fresh look.
Copper
The element copper is mined from the earth in the form of copper ore, a reddish-colored substance. After a while the substance develops an oxide layer that forms a blue-green patina. Copper is a reddish gold, relatively soft metal that can be melted down any number of times and any impurities can be removed. Since copper is an extremely good conductor of electricity, it is also used in electronics.
Copper runs as a red thread throughout Swedish history. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Falu Coppermine was the biggest in Europe, and the profitable mining of the ore was an important Swedish export and a major contributor to the economy of the country. Falu red, the house paint known worldwide, is a by-product of the copper mines, and red cottages with white-painted corners have become Sweden’s trademark.
Tin
Tin is a silvery-white metallic element that is extracted primarily from the mineral cassiterite found in granite, slate, and so on. Since tin has such a low melting point, it is often used for casting. Tin does not normally oxidize with oxygen, but it can be affected by acids and alkalis. Avoid storing tin objects at temperatures below 50 degrees Fahrenheit as this can cause tin pest—blemishing of the metal surface. Tin is a soft material that needs to be handled carefully. It is not recommended to use polishes on tin as it can easily be scratched.
Glass
Glass may be transparent, but it isn’t always that obvious what it is made of and what kind of safety you are getting when you buy it. Glass is manufactured from three main raw materials: sand (silicon dioxide), soda (sodium carbonate), and lime (calcium carbonate), mixed together, heated, and then cooled. The material can be given different qualities with the help of various additives that, for instance, affect the color, weight, luster, and load strength.
An example of the breakage pattern on glass that hasn’t been tempered: the glass forms large, sharp shards on breaking.
An example of the breakage pattern on tempered glass: the glass disintegrates into a mass of very small granules.
An example of the breakage pattern of laminated glass: the plastic film holds the pieces of glass together, thus minimizing the risk of cuts and injuries.
Hardened Safety Glass (Tempered Glass)
Since glass is susceptible to breakage and scratches from bangs and thumps, mechanical loads, high heat, and uneven stresses, it is always important to choose hardened/tempered glass when you can. When tempered glass breaks, it shatters myriad small pellets, which have only a very small risk of causing cuts, whereas the shards and splinters of ordinary glass when it shatters can be as long and sharp as knives and lead to serious wounds. Tempered glass—hardened safety glass—is heated to about 1,200°F (650°C) and then cooled quickly. This leads to contraction of the outer layer of the glass and compression of the middle layer, making the glass stronger than ordinary glass.
Tempered glass will withstand heavier loading, but it may lose its strength if scratched, which is why you should be careful about placing things like rough ceramics and decorative items with uneven bases on tempered glass. Even small scratches can lead to the glass shattering with any major changes in heat or tension. You don’t need do any more than google “glass table explodes” to find newspaper articles proving that it really does happen now and then. Tempered glass is relatively cheap, but you have to state the size when ordering as it is not possible to cut it once it’s been hardened.
Laminated Safety Glass
As well as hardening, the risk of cuts from broken glass can be minimized by a process of lamination, in which two or more sheets of glass are alternated with plastic film. That makes the glass tougher and, should the glass break, the splinters remain attached to the plastic film.
Colored Glass
By coloring molten glass during the manufacturing process, it’s possible to achieve a variety of effects, such as smoked glass (popular for side tables and glass tops) or colored glass. Different effects can be created by using different color films when laminating safety glass.
Leaded Glass
Leaded glasswork is a kind of mosaic created by colored pieces being soldered together or held together by lead edging. You can see it, for instance, in older display cabinets and also on lamps. Lead and lead compounds are poisonous, so you should always wear gloves to avoid the lead being in contact with your skin. If a sheet of leaded glass breaks, it is important to collect up all the pieces. You must not throw them into the rubbish or into the ordinary glass recycling bin, they should be taken to a recycling center.
Etched Glass
Etched glass is created by mechanically roughening selected areas of the surface so that they become matte and cloudy (not transparent). It is found quite commonly as a decorative feature on inside doors and also on display cabinets.
Plexiglas
The name Plexiglas is actually misleading, partly because it’s a form of plastic, not glass in the proper sense of the word, and partly because it’s actually the trademark for polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA). Plexiglas is considerably stronger than real glass, and it also weighs less, which means that furnishings made partly or wholly of Plexiglas are much lighter than if they had been made of real glass. Moreover, Plexiglas is malleable, flexible, and easy to color, but on the other hand, it is more sensitive to scratching and strong cleaning treatments.
Timeline
When my first book was translated into twenty-nine languages, many of the questions asked by journalists from abroad concerned Scandinavian aesthetics. They were asking how our houses and furniture differ from that of the rest of the world and why our design language has become such an international success.
My initial response was instinctive, and I answered in more or less the same way as I’d heard many other people say before me: that our motto is “form should follow function”; that many designers have been inspired by a closeness to nature; that our democratic system in Sweden has undoubtedly contributed to raising the standard of the Swedish welfare state. But the more often I repeated this explanation, the more I questioned what I really meant. I honestly found that I couldn’t give many concrete or illustrative descriptions to go with these loose assertions. So I decided to dig deeper into our design history in order to find out more.
From Poverty to Artistry
When we look around Swedish homes as they are today, it is difficult to imagine that at the start of the twentieth century Sweden actually had the lowest standard of housing in the whole of Europe. The population doubled during the nineteenth century as a result of, in the words of the poet Esaias Tegnér, “peace, potatoes, and the vaccine.” At the same time, however, we suffered many years of bad harvests, which led to more and more shortages. And the ever-harder competition for farmland meant that more and more Swedes began moving into the towns in search of work, which meant that by the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a considerable surplus of labor.
Many people found it difficult to support themselves, and they lived in poverty, overcrowding, and filth. At that time, moreover, our electoral franchise was based on income, so the only thing that could be said to have flourished among the general population was discontent. These are some of the reasons why so many people chose to take a ship across the Atlantic in the hope of finding better living conditions. Between 1860 and 1930, about 1.4 million Swedes emigrated, mainly to North America.
It may be the case, however, that those who stayed behind were the ones who made the biggest journey, because in less than seventy-five years, Sweden actually rose from the bottom to the top. By 1975, the housing shortage had been addressed, and Sweden was considered to have by far the highest standard of housing in the world.
The development from poverty to artistry that Sweden is renowned for has been driven by many political reforms, by economic stimulus packages, by state-financed housing research, by strong cooperation between different interest and trade organizations, as well as through diligent and steady work with government consumer information. What follows offers a quick survey of some of the important milestones that may be good to know for those interested in interior design.
Important Milestones in the History of Swedish Design
1844
Drawing School for Craftsmen
In 1844 Nils Månsson Mandelgren from Skåne founded his Sunday Drawing School for Craftsmen in the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. Journeymen and apprentices within the various craft trades could attend in order to learn freehand drawing and gain a wider artistic education on their days off (Sundays).
1845
Foundation of the Swedish Craft Association
The Sunday Drawing School for Craftsmen struggled to secure funding, so Nils Månsson Mandelgren started an association that could support its activity financially. It was called the Swedish Craft Association and is considered to be the oldest association of its kind in the world—these days it goes by the name Swedish Design. The government gave it the task of safeguarding the quality of handcrafted products. The Swedish Craft Association soon took over Nils Månsson Mandelgren’s educational activities, and 1845 marked the starting point of what is now called Konstfack (University of Arts, Crafts and Design). In other words, Sweden was an early starter in terms of both associations for design and higher education for what we now know as product design.
1846
Reform that simplified business enterprises
The Factory and Craft Act, a reform affecting business and commercial life, was introduced in Sweden. It ended the guilds and freed up the right to develop factories and manufacturing. To ensure continued cooperation, the Swedish state recommended that craftsmen should form their own associations—what were called factory and craft associations—to exploit their common interests. It was probably this duty that formed the basis of the many trade associations and the cooperative work that has been of such value to us since the development of Swedish housing and design.
1867–1869
“The Year of Great Weakness”
During these years, Sweden and Finland were struck by bad harvests and failed crops, leading to famine and misery. The year 1867 is called the Year of Great Weakness or the Lichen Year, because the lack of food pushed people into baking bark bread and using lichen to make porridge. The famine led to a dramatic increase in emigration from Sweden during this period.
1905
The Swedish Craft Association Journal started—it changed its name to Form (Design) in 1932. The magazine still appears and is considered one of the foremost as well as oldest journals covering Scandinavian design.
1907
Emigration and the Own-Home Movement
An emigration commission was held at the start of the twentieth century in an attempt to put a brake on the significant level of emigration from the country. High on the popular wish list was both the minimizing of class divisions and improved housing: these led to important political reforms and to the breakthrough and spread of the Own-Home Movement. This was an organization for building one’s own home: Swedish towns and cities provided citizens with favorable loans that enabled them to build a low-cost type of house while the house-owners undertook to do the work and build the house with their own hands.
1912
The Housing Commission and the Housing Census
Once it had become obvious that the housing question was a real hot potato, a national Housing Commission was set up to discover what the true situation was with regard to Swedes and housing. As well as inspecting and examining the situation, the aim was to offer advice, contribute to cheaper methods of building, and to simplify building regulations and house loans. The first Swedish census of the population and housing was carried out in this period.
1914
Employment service between the arts and industry
The Swedish Craft Association set up its own employment agency under the leadership of Elsa Gullberg: its function was to act as an exchange between artists and industry, the aim being to raise the level of factory-produced items and to create more attractive everyday wares. The ambition was for cheap factory products to have a similarly high level of quality as expensive handmade goods, so that the working class might have access to beauty and not have to put up with rubbish or “bad copies of bourgeois aesthetics.”
1917
The Home Exhibition at Liljevalch’s
The Home Exhibition arranged at Liljevalch’s Art Gallery by the Swedish Craft Association aimed to provide the working class with simple furniture and household equipment at reasonable prices but designed by well-known Swedish artists and architects. In advance of the exhibition, a competition was held in which the designers and businesses taking part were to produce items for the show. These were then shown in twenty-three furnished rooms. The exhibition was a major public success, and it is where Gunnar Asplund, Uno Åhrén, and Carl Malmsten achieved their breakthroughs. Eight thousand visitors had been expected, but there was more than forty thousand. Critics, however, are of the opinion that the main target group, the working class, was conspicuous by its absence, and instead the exhibition created new interior design trends for the better-off.
1918
Association of Furniture Dealers
During the 1910s the trade in furniture moved away from local craftsmen to specialized furniture shops with factory-produced goods. The increasing number of furniture shops eventually led to the formation of an association of furniture dealers in order to protect the interests of its members with common price lists, the regulation of trade between factory and individual shops and courses and education along with common advertising campaigns.
1919
More Beautiful Everyday Commodities
Gregor Paulsson wrote the groundbreaking book More Beautiful Everyday Commodities for an exhibition at the Swedish Fair in Gothenburg. It also became the first propaganda publication of the Swedish Craft Association. Paulsson argued that artists and crafts people should cooperate with industry to raise the quality of everyday commodities.
1922
Foundation of SIS
The Swedish Industry Standardization Commission (SIS) was formed to promote standards that could scale up production and trade without losing sight of important functional and safety aspects.
1927
The very first furniture fair was held in Sweden.
1928
Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson gave his famous speech about “folkhemmet,” a home for the people, that dealt—among much else—with every citizen’s right to good housing.
1930
The birth of functionalism
The Stockholm Exhibition was organized by the city of Stockholm and the Swedish Craft Association in order to present ideas for Swedish architecture, design, and crafts. Generally recognized as being the great breakthrough for the ideals of functionalism in Sweden, it promoted a healthier and more democratic standard of living with, for instance, a clear functional distinction between the use of rooms, for example, separate rooms for sleeping, living, eating, and cooking. The aesthetics of furnishing and interior design were to be characterized by the ideal and the will to unite form and function. Ideally, houses should feel close to nature by having large windows and allowing in plenty of daylight, compared with the dark, heavy interiors and ostentatious ideals that had been dominant for so long.
