Praise of Danish
design and style mounted immediately in the U.S. by way of exhibitions, journal articles or blog posts, and
phrase-of-mouth. Taft relates how Wegner was approached by a associates-only club in
Chicago in 1949 hoping to obtain 400 chairs, a range far outside of the potential
of the Copenhagen workshop that generated them. Danish chairs turned a bragging
proper with devotees memorizing the shapes and mentally cataloging the readily available
colors of upholstery. The urge for food for Scandi home furnishings was so voracious that
knock-offs proliferated. Legitimate producers began affixing metal plates, stamps,
and brands to the underside of their home furniture. Just one would not be astonished to
see their dinner visitor surreptitiously peering beneath the Chieftain seeking for
where by the wooden had been marked by a hot iron in the Danish workshop.
The heyday of artisan
household furniture, nevertheless, was transient. Maintaining output in Denmark, or even in
Scandinavia, did not past extended. In 1951, Juhl began planning for Baker, a
household furniture company from Michigan the idea was to offer his designs to a greater
mass sector by scaling-up manufacturing. Nevertheless it was never apparent how the amount of
high-quality could be maintained outside the house of the Scandinavian welfare state with its
distinctive compromises amongst federal government, marketplace, and labor. In an American mass
industry, it would be tricky to make tasteful joinery applying Fordist production
techniques (and to pay out artisan wages to assembly line workers). As the scale of
creation improved, it was additional hard to sustain the myth of “Nordic
naturalness” and wood forms that represented a closeness to nature. In actuality,
even the teak was remaining supplanted by razor-slim slices of rosewood pasted onto
furnishings facades.
Meanwhile, free
authorized protections for furnishings layout meant that fakes and copies
proliferated. Very well-heeled travelers in Copenhagen could pay a visit to the huge
furniture showroom Den Permanente in the vicinity of the central station to see genuine
Juhls and Wegners, but they could also saunter around to Tidens Møbler, a retailer
that “offered copies that appeared approximately as good” at a steep markdown. “And when
exported to The us, both equally the genuine issue and the duplicate could legitimately be
labeled ‘Made in Denmark.’” Even extra alarmingly, American companies were being
generating phony Danish furniture of lesser top quality and at decrease charges. Some of
these organizations still exist these days since of their prosperous foray into
midcentury design and style.