Mücke & Melder

Products from this producer offered by Prague Art & Design

“Metal in furniture plays equal role as cement in architecture. It is a revolution.” This is how Ch. Perriand commented on the atmosphere of her era in the 1929 article “Wood or Metal?” The architects’ interest in metal departed from the responses to the new ways of perceiving form in the field of sitting furniture made of bent wood and produced by the company Thonet and from their efforts to substitute wood for metal tube. Even though the manufacturers already had some experience in using metal in furniture production, the main point at stake were cast-iron parts of garden and park furniture. In the Art Nouveau period at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, metal furniture was perceived as somewhat heavy-handed, and it thus got to the fore only as late as with architects professing Functionalism who focused on bent tube composed of two parts in order to design furniture of pure and simple forms in a space that basically drew S-shaped lines.

Even though studio production of metal furniture began to rather shyly develop after the First World War, the prior position in this field is unambiguously occupied by one of the main representatives of Bauhaus, Marcel Breuer. His “Wassily” chair became so inspiring that its continual line of curves with corded hand-rests came to rule the oeuvre of many architects for a rather long period of time. The author of other variants was the Netherlands’ architect Martin Stam who first introduced the frameless chair lacking rear legs. This type of chair was patented and was also soon produced by Czech factories.

Yet another famed architect linked with the Czech lands was Mies van der Rohe. He followed up with the work of Breuer and Stam except that he substituted the tube profile by a flat one, thus arriving at more flexibility and at the same time more comfort in the field of sitting furniture. All the above-mentioned architects – Martin Stam, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe, but also Le Corbusier – collaborated with Czech companies and mainly with the Thonet factory. The activities of these luminaries naturally greatly influenced Czech avant-garde, which is why the subject of metal furniture found immense response in the Czech lands. This further resulted in the appearance of many technologically advanced manufacturers who closely collaborated with the world elite in this field, the company Mücke-Melder being one of them.

After the Second World War, Mücke-Melder was nationalized along with most Czech enterprises and became part of the KOVONA national enterprise, being merged with companies Vichr and comp., Hynek Gottwald (Brandýs nad Orlicí), František Jergl Brno, Robert Slezák (Bystřice pod Hostýnem), Trezoria Praha, SAB Praha, Robert Slezák (Vysoká n.Kysucou) and the national enterprise Radovan (Mělník). During the 1950s the resulting enterprise was reorganized, which resulted in the establishment of the national enterprise Kovona, based in Lysá nad Labem, which took over all debts and liabilities of the individual factories. The enterprise Kovona, Lysá nad Labem, however, is active even today despite all the many transformations.