Hand made in Italy! The steelworks

It all began, when Mart Stam and some other Bauhaus designers started making furniture out of 1" steel tubes. Those are widely available since they are the standard material for domestic gas and water pipes and ideal for industrial processing. So they thought, fact is however that making furniture out of them still nowadays requires a lot of hand labor.

Large piles of steel tubes of different sections and diameters are brought to the factory. They are first being cut to lengths, as the upper frame of a Corbusier Chaiselongue consists of no less than five different pieces of tubular steel.

Computer controlled bending machines curve the steel sections to their shapes. As many as 16 curves of different radiuses need to be shaped for a Chaiselongue frame.

The welders clamp the frame components into templates and hard-solder them. The picture on the left shows the different sections of a Corbusier LC 2 armchair frame, the picture on the right shows the welding of a Chaiselongue.

No less than 14 welding seems have to be ground down in the next step, before the raw structures are ready to be shipped to the electroplating plant.