Ikea did not invent flat-packed furniture nor containerization, though the company was able to exploit technological advances of the post-World War II era such as the development of the shipping container to their benefit and has since developed a corporate mythology that obscures historical precedent.

I’m not going to dwell much upon the development of containerization. I encourage you to read Marc Levinson’s brilliant 2006 book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger for the history of that topic.[1]

Instead, I am interested in the development of flat-packed (also known historically as “knocked-down”) furniture. Historians of design will point to the Viennese firm Gebrüder Thonet—led by cabinetmaker Michel Thonet—as the pioneer in this field. The Thonet company led the way in the development of bentwood furniture and the application of modern industrial methods in the mass production of furniture beginning in the 1830s. Among the firm’s most famous designs is chair “No. 14” of 1859 (known as the “bistro chair” or “cafe chair”), which has been widely imitated.[2]

Thonet wasn’t the first to use steam to bend wood for furniture (Windsor chairs can stake a claim to that distinction), but they did adopt the use of metal forms to allow mass machine production of the beechwood frames. The thickly upholstered seats common to furniture of this period were replaced with handwoven cane, and complex glued joints were replaced with metal screws, allowing the chairs to be disassembled easily and packed tightly for transport. It is said 36 No. 14 chairs could fit into a sea chest measuring one cubic meter.[3]

The chairs were lightweight, making them less expensive and ideal for furnishing restaurants and performance halls dedicated to new forms of mass amusement. They were also impervious to heat and moisture, which allowed them to be exported to tropical climates. Michel Thonet garnered awards and accolades for his process and designs after exhibiting the chairs at the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London and the 1855 and 1867 Expositions Universelles in Paris. By 1900, it is estimated the Thonet company had manufactured and sold 40 million No. 14 chairs to consumers around the globe.[4]

Architects and designers throughout the 20th century, including Alvar Aalto, Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eileen Gray and Charles and Ray Eames, took inspiration from Thonet for their own experimentation with bentwood and tubular steel furniture. In a 1953 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Michel Thonet’s contribution to the furniture industry was recognized as a precursor of Henry Ford’s introduction of the assembly line in the production of automobiles.[5]

Another admirer was Ikea. In 1996, they released a copy of Thonet’s cafe chair made from injection-molded plastic.

Sources:

[1] Marc Levinson. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006.

[2] Alexander von Vegesack. Thonet: Classic Furniture in Bent Wood and Tubular Steel. New York: Rizzoli, 1997.

[3] Derek E. Ostergard, ed. Bent Wood and Metal Furniture: 1850-1946. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987.

[4] Clement Meadmore. The Modern Chair: Classic Designs by Thonet, Breuer, Le Corbusier, Eames and Others. New York: Courier Dover, 2019.

[5] Thonet furniture, 1830-1953 : an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1953).