Mass-produced aura: Thonet and the market for modern design, 1930--1953

This dissertation analyzes the exchange between multinational mass-producer Thonet and architects affiliated with the modern movement including Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, Breuer and Lurcat during the interwar decades. Aura is here considered the equivalent of an intangible asset for Thonet, an asset akin to the "good will," that, like most assets, require maintenance in order to not degrade in value. Thonet's brand name held an auratic appeal for progressive architects seeking to ally themselves with the productive capacities and the alluring image of industry during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Thonet, in turn, recognized in these progressive architects a source for new furniture designs and a lever by which to pry open markets such as that of the domestic interior that had previously been closed to the firm. In artfully constructing the auratic appeal of its products in relationship to the new aesthetic championed by modern architects, Thonet functioned as an active agent in shaping a new market for modernist design. Thonet's corporate strategies and its interaction with European modernist architects in the interwar period prefigure that which emerges in postwar America as the overt integration of modernist design within corporate design culture. Chapters proceed in a roughly chronological fashion, with a focus on Thonet's activities during the 1930s. Thonet's repeated encounters with the modern movement involve a cycle that mines the auratic potential of brand, signature, lifestyle and institution in order to cultivate new markets for modernism and making for several fruitful decades of mutual instrumentalization.