Thonet 14 Over a hundred and forty years ago, in 1859, a Thonet factory in Koritschan in Moravia, produced the first chair known as number 14 in the catalogues of the Viennese company. About thirty millions chairs manufactured and sold before the 20’s, a worldwide success of an extremely simple model: an archetype of the chair. The success of number 14 is the success of Michael Thonet and the final result of the stubborn conviction that beech-wood and the bending technique represented the future of chair making. Despite its simplicity, the number 14 chair did not disregard the long experience of Michael Thonet and his sons, from both an artistic and a technological point of view; on the contrary, it represents a full summary of it. It embodies the Biedermaier experience of Thonet the cabinetmaker and the various and continuous improvements in the technique used for bending beech-wood, made in the years around 1850 applied to models 1, 2, 3 and 4. Finally, it embodies the influence of the typical iron architecture of the mid-nineteenth century, like Paxton’s Crystal Palace, under whose roof Thonet participated in the Great Exhibition of 1851. The number 14 is not the result of a flash of creative genius, but the end result of a technological quest that lasted almost twenty years; it is precisely its simplicity and adaptability to all places and users that makes it unanimously considered as the first example of industrial design. Minimalist in terms of the use of material and number of constituent pieces, it preceded Mies van der Rohe’s maxim “less is more” by 50 years. Back