Bruno Rey

Bruno Rey (1935–2019), a Swiss industrial designer is best known for the Rey chair, one of the most successful Swiss chairs of all time. Over the course of five decades, it has been sold over 1.5 million times and can be found in many residential as well as public spaces. Over the course of his career, Rey built and rebuilt many other diverse projects. He designed rooms and exhibitions, like the control room at the Mühleberg Nuclear Power Plant in the Canton of Berne; designed gardens and plant containers made from fiber cement for the company Eternit AG. In addition to other industrial design products, Rey devoted himself to buildings and interior design.

Biography

Rey was born in Brugg in the canton of Aargau, Switzerland. He completed an apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker before attending the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich (today ZHdK) in 1957. He received his diploma in 1960 from the interior design class led by Willy Guhl (1915–2004), a pioneering Swiss furniture designer and one of the first industrial designers in Switzerland. Guhl was best known for his Loop Chair from 1954 made of a fibre cement called Eternit, and then bent into the chair’s distinctive wedge-shaped loop.

After graduating, Rey travelled extensively in Switzerland as well as abroad, then took up an internship with the interior designer Paul Sumi from Biel, who sensitized Rey for chairs as design objects. For four years Rey worked for an architectural office that furnished the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva. During this time he took his first independent but still casual interest in furniture. In 1966, amongst other reputable designers like Andreas Christen, Eugen Gomringer, Willy Guhl and Kurt Thut he became the co-founder of the Swiss Design Association (SDA). This was at a time, when the word "designer" or "industrial designer" was only slowly finding its way into everyday language.

Two years later, in 1968 Rey founded his own studio for architecture and industrial design in Baden. In the late 1960s, he started collaborating with the Swiss furniture company Dietiker & Co. in Stein am Rhein, and developed several chair series for them between 1970–84. From 1970–1979 he designed chairs for the German furniture manufacturer, Kusch+Co, like brown dining chairs in leather and beech from 1971, which were also stackable.

During his career as an industrial designer, Rey experimented with a variation of materials. Until 1971, inspired by Charles Eames, he explored plastic chairs made of a few molded parts. In an interview for the Swiss design magazine Hochparterre he commented, “I felt I was on the right track, a modern and innovative track”. Rey developed models and prototypes at his own expense but their production never happened, “which was a failure and at that time hard to digest,” he admitted.

He also experimented with wood, searching for the design of a contemporary wooden chair as a symbol of the present. He ultimately found inspiration in the Thonet bentwood chair from 1850. In an interview with Hochparterre he said, “The idea of designing the plywood seat as a strong base, so that the frame could be omitted, initiated the meticulous search for a connecting piece between the seat and the feet. Aluminium seemed right, although the first chairs wobbled vigorously and did not last long.”

The Rey Chair

The design that emerged from a period of countless experiments was model 3300, the Rey chair, which became one of the most iconic pieces of Swiss industrial design. Made of local beech wood, it was constructed with a unique, screw-less signature metal-to-wood connection. It went into serial production in 1971 and was the first chair to be patented by Dietiker a year later.

In Rey’s design, the chair legs are joined to the self-supporting round seat by means of a bonded aluminum console that was still handmade in 1970/71 using sand casting and afterwards produced using the gravity die casting process. In 1989 the invention of aluminum pressure die casting then allowed for the industrial production of the chair in large series. Except for the final finishing, the entire production process could then be done by machine, including the gluing of the wood and metal at a bonding carousel.

The chair was available with a plain solid wood or an upholstered seat and was also manufactured in other variations, like a bar stool and a stool. The client can also choose between large selections of colours for the finish. The Rey chair is not an individual piece of furniture but is almost always used in a group setting often placed around a table.12

In 2014 Bruno Rey’s model 3300 was also produced in a junior edition. The solid execution and rounded edges of these extraordinarily stable and stackable chairs and matching table are perfectly suited for children’s usage.

Bruno Rey & Charles Polin

In 1977 Rey started collaborating with the renowned designer Charles Polin (b. 1951), a freelance designer specializing in seating for public and private spaces. They had the goal, “to create a chair with universal functionality and not just a flash in the pan.” During a four-year development period, they created the first joint chair model and presented the final result in 1980: the Quadro W chair, which was a technological innovation combining a simple form with good sitting comfort. The frames of both the seat and the back consist of flat solid beech wood profiles and are connected with chrome plated, flexible steel springs. The name Quadro is derived from those very four flex springs that connect seat and back. The legs swing out from the seat’s frame, making all chairs stackable. Dietiker launched the Quadro W chair in 1989.

In 1987 Rey moved his studio from the old town of Baden to the former farming village of Gebenstorf. Rey and Polin worked as official partners together in a converted farmhouse that had a drawing room and an extensive workshop, which was also fully equipped for model making. They developed numerous award-winning furniture pieces for companies such as Hiller Objektmöbel, Kusch+Co and Plank GmbH. For Dietiker, the team designed next to the Quadro W stacking chair, the Patron restaurant chair. in 1995 Bruno Rey and Charles Polin launched the table XY.

Furniture Designs by Bruno Rey

·      Caslon, plant container by Bruno Rey for Eternit AG. Asbestos cement, metal base; design Switzerland 1959.

·      Bar Stools in Leatherette. Bruno Rey for Dietiker. Birch, leatherette and metal; design Switzerland 1970, produced 1970–1979.

·      Brown dining chair. Bruno Rey for Kusch + Co. Leather and beech, stackable; design Switzerland 1971.

·      Rey chair. Model 3300. Bruno Rey for Dietiker. Beech, cast aluminium, plastic glides; design and production Switzerland 1971.

·      Program 33 stools, chairs, tables Bruno Rey for Dietiker + Co AG, 1972.

·      Quadro W chair. Bruno Rey and Charles Polin for Dietiker. Beech, chrome plating; designed and produced in Switzerland, design period 1980–1989, production to date.

·      XY Table (conference table) Bruno Rey and Charles Polin for Dietiker. Chrome-plated steel tube, in veneer, solid wood, diagonal massive wood in beech, or linoleum; design and product launch 1992

Philosophy

Rey’s search for organic forms in contrast to the stubborn formalism of the 1960’s and 70’s was also a personal revolution against the prevailing design doctrine of his time; an attempt to distance himself from an existing generation of designers.

In light of the angular-formalistic, cubically austere furniture without any seating quality, which was common at the time and that forced an alignment with the walls, I suspected for the first time that new, round furniture forms could be both necessary and useful for the space and people. –– Bruno Rey I want to make complex relationships visible and manageable, instead of contributing even more to the superfluous and superficial. ––Bruno Rey

Bibliography

Frey, Gilbert, Claude Lichtenstein and Arthur Rüegg. Schweizer Möbeldesign 1927–1984. Mobilier Suisse Création De 1927-1984. Exhibition catalogue, 15 April – 21 Mai 1986. Bern: Benteli, 1986.

Müller, Franziska. “Bruno Rey. Erfinder des Sitzens.” Hochparterre: Zeitschrift für Architektur und Design, vol. 2, 1989, 30–36.

Rüegg, Arthur (ed.). Swiss Furniture and Interiors in the 20th Century. In Collaboration with the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Design-Sammlung, the Gesellschaft für Schweizerische Kunstgeschichte GSK and the Eidg. Technische Hochschule Zürich, Department of Architecture]. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2002.

External Links

eGuide. Museum für Gestaltung. Editor Christian Brände. Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. https://www.eguide.ch/en/objekt/rey-junior/