Founded in 1929, Isokon was the first company in Britain solely devoted to constructing modernist apartments and houses, and soon after, manufacturing plywood furniture for them: this plywood stool is the first style they produced. Jack Prichard, who started the furniture part of the company in 1935, immediately hired German émigré Walter Gropius as the "Controller of Design" (a grand term for a tiny experimental endeavor). While a variant of this stool had been in production for a few years earlier, this particular version was modified by Gropius, as documented by drawings signed by him and now at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
The stool provides a fascinating, complicated story of design transmission and collaboration. In the early 1930s Prichard had worked for the Venesta Plywood Company in Estonia. When he joined Isokon, he initially imported the plywood furniture from Venesta, but soon applied the knowledge gained in Estonia to his own line manufactured in England. However, he also continued to import from Estonia furniture he himself had designed. This stool has a paper label marking it as a Venesta product, but it is a Prichard design then altered by Gropius.
LACMA is fortunate to have another Isokon work in the collection (M.2008.36) -- the iconic chaise longue designed by Marcel Breuer (Breuer replaced Gropius as "Controller of Design" when the latter moved to the United States in 1937).
Wendy Kaplan, Curator & Department Head of Decorative Arts and Design
