Thonet B9

The beginning of a special love story: the Thonet B9 by Gebrüder Thonet GmbH, 1927, Design Collection, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich.

My favourite piece

BRUNO MONGUZZI

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I discovered the Thonet B9 in the first volume of Girsberger’s book about Le Corbusier. I immediately noticed  how perfectly it fitted into the house that Le Corbusier had designed in 1923 for the Parisian art collector Raoul La Roche and the Jeanneret family, as well as into the furnishings of the houses in the innovative Frugès settlement in Pessac (1925). The visionary industrialist Frugès had commissioned Le Corbusier to design a Cité Jardin for his workers and asked him to put his theories for the radical economic and structural reform of  housing into practice. A few pages later, still in the same book, I again came across the essential geometry of this surprising Thonet, in the rooms of the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, which Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret had designed for the “International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts and Decorative Crafts” in Paris.
In 1961, when I began working at the Studio Boggeri in Milan, I finally got to see this piece in real life. In its timeless beauty. Antonio Boggeri had given this wonderful chair to his daughter Anna. Beautiful Anna and the B9 have now been my companions for fifty years.