Living and Project
In 1850, Michael Thonet presented his chair no. 4 at an
exhibition of the trade association of Lower Austria. The
gastronomer Anna Daum was fascinated with it and gave
him a large-scale order to furnish her coffee house at
Vienna’s Kohlmarkt.
Later on, an order from a hotel in Budapest for 400 copies
of chair no. 4 was added. These are milestones in the early
project business at Thonet.
In 1904, Otto Wagner, a teacher at the art academy and
one of the “original fathers” of the Vienna Secession,
designed an armchair made of squared beech wood in an
objectively strict constructive style for the assembly hall of
the directorate of the Vienna Postal Savings Bank: fauteuil
no. 6516, the so-called “Postal Savings Bank armchair”.
