Praise of Danish
design mounted speedily in the U.S. by way of exhibitions, magazine posts, and
phrase-of-mouth. Taft relates how Wegner was approached by a members-only club in
Chicago in 1949 hoping to receive 400 chairs, a range significantly past the capability
of the Copenhagen workshop that made them. Danish chairs turned a bragging
appropriate with devotees memorizing the shapes and mentally cataloging the readily available
hues of upholstery. The urge for food for Scandi home furnishings was so voracious that
knock-offs proliferated. Genuine producers commenced affixing steel plates, stamps,
and brands to the underside of their household furniture. A single would not be amazed to
see their supper guest surreptitiously peering beneath the Chieftain looking for
wherever the wooden experienced been marked by a very hot iron in the Danish workshop.
The heyday of artisan
home furnishings, on the other hand, was short. Holding production in Denmark, or even in
Scandinavia, did not final very long. In 1951, Juhl commenced creating for Baker, a
furnishings business from Michigan the thought was to sell his models to a larger sized
mass current market by scaling-up manufacturing. Still it was by no means very clear how the degree of
excellent could be managed outside the house of the Scandinavian welfare point out with its
exclusive compromises between federal government, market, and labor. In an American mass
industry, it would be hard to make elegant joinery making use of Fordist manufacturing
tactics (and to pay back artisan wages to assembly line employees). As the scale of
production improved, it was additional hard to retain the myth of “Nordic
naturalness” and wooden forms that represented a closeness to character. In simple fact,
even the teak was currently being supplanted by razor-thin slices of rosewood pasted on to
furniture facades.
Meanwhile, free
lawful protections for home furniture design intended that fakes and copies
proliferated. Nicely-heeled vacationers in Copenhagen could stop by the enormous
furnishings showroom Den Permanente in the vicinity of the central station to see genuine
Juhls and Wegners, but they could also saunter about to Tidens Møbler, a store
that “offered copies that seemed almost as good” at a steep markdown. “And when
exported to America, the two the true point and the copy could legitimately be
labeled ‘Made in Denmark.’” Even far more alarmingly, American companies ended up
producing fake Danish home furnishings of lesser high-quality and at reduced prices. Some of
these businesses even now exist these days mainly because of their effective foray into
midcentury structure.
