Tibor Tóth pursued his professional studies between 1963 and 1968 at the Magyar Iparművészeti Főiskola (College of Applied Arts). This was a period when the former Department of Interior Design operated under the name Department of Architecture, offering a comprehensive educational programme encompassing architecture, interior architecture, and furniture design, under the leadership of the architect György Szrogh. Graduates were required to demonstrate, at a university level, the knowledge necessary across all three fields, and at the same time were equipped to embark successfully on their professional careers in each of these areas.
After receiving his diploma, Tibor Tóth chose furniture design as his life vocation, more specifically its more demanding form: industrial-scale factory design. He also chose the setting for this work accordingly, returning to the company from which he had come to Budapest – the Kanizsai Bútorgyár (Kanizsa Furniture Factory) in Nagykanizsa. He began his design career at a moment when the Hungarian economy and industry were themselves entering a new phase: in 1968 the New Economic Mechanism was launched, granting greater autonomy to production plants and making the improvement of the population’s standard of living a central political objective. One important institutional manifestation of this shift was the establishment in 1967 of the Kiváló Áruk Fóruma (Forum of Excellent Products), popularly known as KÁF, where technical content, price, and appearance – form – were evaluated and rewarded on equal terms, with the aim of raising the overall standard of industrially manufactured products.
This intention, however, was far from being supported by the necessary conditions. Initially, the limited range of available materials and the outdated machinery hindered development-oriented production work; later, by the early 1970s, the furniture industry reconstruction resulted in a standardised machinery stock that posed new difficulties for designers. The shortage of high-quality materials and fittings continued for a long time to delay international competitiveness. Difficulties were also present in domestic distribution due to the monopoly position of the Bútoripari Kereskedelmi Vállalat (Furniture Trade Company, Bútorker), since the pervasive shortage clearly perceptible in the market – and indeed throughout society – created no pressure to experiment. As a consequence, stimulating consumer expectations likewise remained below the international average. For a long time, industrial furniture design was carried out by the staff of the Faipari Gyártásszervező és Szerkesztő Iroda (Wood Industry Production Organisation and Design Office), established in 1950, including János Bodnár, László Herczendorfer, László Mózer and Sándor Palócz, and in the field of kitchen furniture, Zoltán Kemény. Alongside products shaped by the dual pressure of manufacturing and commerce, the only representatives of a higher-quality selection were the unique and small-series furniture pieces created by applied artists working within the Iparművészeti Vállalat (Applied Arts Company), such as Sándor Bedécs, György Fekete and Júlia Gaubek.
In 1970, Tibor Tóth presented his first modular furniture ensemble, titled Capri, at the annual showcase of industrial products, the Budapesti Nemzetközi Vásár (Budapest International Fair, BNV). Its matte-lacquered light maple veneer stood in marked contrast to the customary high-gloss dark walnut and mahogany surfaces of the period. The piece proved so striking and successful that one of the era’s most prominent actors, Lajos Básti, purchased the exhibited example. From his very earliest works, however, Tibor Tóth was guided not merely by fashion but by the aspiration towards comprehensive modernity – an attitude grounded in a joint understanding of market and manufacturing demands, and one that sought to move forward, on the basis of domestic realities, in alignment with international tendencies.
The quality production and differentiation of the surfaces that decisively shaped the appearance of large-scale cabinet furniture became possible through the shift from natural veneer-based finishes to laminated and foil-faced surfaces; otherwise, it would have been impossible to ensure uniform colour and grain, and thus the expandability of product lines. Tibor Tóth exploited this transition with great mastery, pairing it with his steadily expanding designer–manufacturer expertise to develop differentiating details, refined decorative solutions, and ultimately a distinctive corporate and individual character. Over the subsequent quarter century, one after another, his panel-constructed modular furniture systems achieved recognition both from the public and within the profession. Among the most successful were the Mozaik elemes korpusz bútorcsalád (Mozaik Modular Cabinet Furniture Family, 1978) and the Nelli elemes kárpitos bútorcsalád (Nelli Modular Upholstered Furniture Family, 1979), which generated several hundred million forints in profit for the factory (the former nearly 230 million, the latter more than 340 million forints). Even the 110 elemes Konvoj korpusz bútorcsalád (110-Piece Konvoj Cabinet Furniture Family), introduced roughly a decade later, achieved sales worth 130 million forints. Consumer demand was driven primarily by the massive prefabricated housing construction programmes of the 1970s. As a result, nearly 27,000 units of the Kupidó lakószoba (Cupid Living Room Set, 1971) were sold; more than 27,000 units of the Piccolo lakószoba (Piccolo Living Room Set, 1973); over 50,000 units of the Júlia kárpitozott garnitúra (Julia Upholstered Suite, 1974); close to 30,000 units of the Ritmus előszoba elemes bútorrendszer (Rhythm Modular Hallway Furniture System, 1977); and even the Tekla szekrénysor (Tekla Wall Unit, 1980) found more than 30,000 buyers. From the late 1980s onward, however – with the exception of the nostalgically inflected Konvoj, the contemporaneous L.M.S. ülőgarnitúra család (L.M.S. Seating Suite Family), marketed at a value of 58 million forints, and the 60 elemes Montana korpuszbútor-család (60-Piece Montana Cabinet Furniture Family, 15 million forints) – production volumes declined first to the low thousands and then to the hundreds. This contraction was due partly to general economic difficulties and partly to the expanding availability of foreign furniture products.
Among the memorable formal solutions of the early 1990s are the Axel nappali bútorcsalád (Axel living room furniture family), tuned to a blue–black colour pairing, as well as the white–green Ékes elemes korpusz bútorcsalád (Ékes modular cabinet furniture family) and the white–blue Káró elemes korpusz bútorcsalád (Káró modular cabinet furniture family), all dating from 1992. Special mention should also be made of his vividly coloured upholstered furniture designed to complement wall-unit systems, which consistently express the joy of breaking out from the planar discipline of panel-based constructions. One of his finest works, the two-seater convertible Levente (Levente) sofa (199?), is characterised by liberated yet well-balanced forms and large-patterned upholstery fabrics that radiate a light, relaxed atmosphere.
By the mid-1990s, Tibor Tóth himself was compelled to make a change: he left the Kanizsa Bútorgyár (Kanizsa Furniture Factory) and first served as artistic director at Domus Rt. (Domus Plc.), then worked over the following years for a number of companies, including the Ipoly Bútorgyár (Ipoly Furniture Factory), the Debreceni Bútorgyár (Debrecen Furniture Factory), the BUBIV Palota Bútor Rt. (BUBIV Palace Furniture Plc.), the Kapos Bútorgyár (Kapos Furniture Factory), and the Zala Bútor Rt. (Zala Furniture Plc.). His greatest commercial success during this period was achieved with the Ipoly Lady-lux furniture family (1995), which generated a turnover of 120 million forints over four years, while the 70-element modular cabinet furniture family he designed for Kapos also proved to be a significant success (1999), with sales reaching 120 million forints within a single year.
Alongside his work in industrial furniture design, Tibor Tóth consistently created bespoke furniture as well, primarily in the context of his interior design practice. His first interior design commissions came from his hometown, which was well acquainted with his factory-based work, and involved the refurbishment of the city’s public offices. Subsequently, following the successful modernisation of party offices in Somogy, Zala and Vas counties, he became a sought-after designer, and between 1971 and 2003 he completed more than fifty major interior design projects for state, political and ecclesiastical institutions, production plants and other enterprises, as well as for private clients, designing offices, apartments and holiday homes in Hungary (predominantly in Transdanubia and Budapest) and abroad (in Moscow in 1973 and in Borjomi, Georgia, in 1992). Among his most significant achievements was winning the international competition for the design of the Moscow residence of the SZKP KB Társadalomtudományi Akadémiája (Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the CPSU), as well as the interior design of the 360-room Georgian therapeutic sanatorium. Of his domestic commissions, three projects from the 1990s stand out as particularly memorable: the listed-building reconstruction of the Prímási Palota in Buda Castle (in collaboration with Judit Czéh), the design of the 3,000-square-metre ABC supermarket within the Mediterrán Autós Bevásárlóközpont in Balatonfüred, and the complete exterior and interior transformation of the Budapest headquarters of Papírker Rt.
Throughout Tibor Tóth’s wide-ranging and richly varied body of work, he was never compelled to alter his fundamental conceptual principles over time. His openness to new manufacturing and market demands, together with his steadily expanding professional experience, consistently provided a solid foundation for his design practice and, from the 1990s onwards, also for his teaching activity at the Nyugat-magyarországi Egyetem (University of West Hungary). The achievements of his students and former pupils continue to carry forward and affirm his principles and professional accomplishments.
[2014]
Bibliography
Tasnádi, Attila: Tibor Tóth bútoripari formatervező (pályakép) (Tibor Tóth, Industrial Furniture Designer: Career Overview). NKA manuscript (National Cultural Fund of Hungary).
Lelkes, Péter: Art Designer. Budapest, Magyar Design Kulturális Alapítvány (Hungarian Design Cultural Foundation), 2004.
Tasnádi, Attila: Nagyipari bútortervezés és gyártás Magyarországon 1945–1990 (Large-Scale Furniture Design and Production in Hungary, 1945–1990). Budapest, Orpheusz Könyvek, 2009.
Attila Tasnádi: Tibor Tóth Industrial Furniture Designer
On the occasion of the 1975 Jubilee Exhibition of Applied Arts, which set out to survey the post-war development of Hungarian applied arts, the journal Művészet devoted an entire issue to analysing the exhibition’s six thematic sections, with the aim of presenting the leap-like progress that Hungarian applied arts had undergone over the previous thirty years. For these analyses and for the evaluation of the achievements attained, the journal invited leading experts from the individual branches of applied art, assigning them the task of examining their respective fields not only on the basis of internal developmental logics but also in the light of social needs: namely, how the progress, scope of tasks and programme of the given discipline contributed to the realisation of the cultural and economic objectives of the socialist social formation. In this context, alongside environmental and object culture (clothing, household items, tools of labour, etc.), attention was also paid to developments in furniture design, the most important component of interior furnishing, specifically to an assessment of the extent to which the products of large-scale industrial furniture manufacturing, which had taken shape around 1970, met the requirements of what was understood as a modern type of standardised furniture. The analysis authored by József Bokor arrived at an ambivalent conclusion: while it acknowledged that, as a result of technical and technological advances in recent years, the obstacles to serial production had largely been removed, it also noted that quantitative growth had mostly come at the expense of quality. Bokor attributed this to the fact that there were very few furniture designers willing to undertake factory-based work; most preferred employment in design institutes or worked on individual commissions for the workshops of the Képcsarnok. As a result, the designer’s mindset necessarily failed to meet large-scale industry, and even when it did, the permanent struggle with manufacturers and traders, coupled with the neglect of audience expectations and market considerations, worked against optimal cooperation. According to his information, large-scale residential furniture factories employed only eight to ten designers, and among them he could name only three who could truly be regarded as successful on the basis of the works presented at the exhibition: János Bodnár of the Budapesti Bútoripari Vállalat (better known as BUBIV), József Király of the Szék- és Kárpitosipari Vállalat, and Tibor Tóth, designer at the Kanizsa Bútorgyár in Nagykanizsa. What they achieved – the reviewer concluded – was genuinely high-quality performance, that is, true design.
This distinction, at least in the case of Tibor Tóth, must be regarded as a significant mark of recognition, since in contrast to János Bodnár and József Király – both acknowledged veterans of the furniture profession – the designer of the Kanizsa Bútorgyár was still a decidedly young creator at the time. Although he had completed his studies at the college in 1968 and therefore could hardly be described as a beginner, at the age of thirty-three he was no more than one of the promising talents of his generation, the cohort that entered the profession in the late 1960s. That he came into the focus of a jubilee exhibition bringing together the very best of the contemporary Hungarian artistic community unquestionably demonstrated that he was not lacking in ambition and that, in terms of his abilities, he could play a role in revitalising the domestic furniture industry. Those who thought so were not disappointed in their expectations: over the course of the twenty-seven years he spent at the Kanizsa Bútorgyár, Tibor Tóth grew into one of the defining figures of large-scale industrial furniture production, and even under the largely unfavourable – indeed often adverse – conditions prevailing in Hungary, he created a body of work that is remarkable, as will be shown below.
Tibor Tóth (registered at birth as Tibor Pál Tóth) was born on 20 May 1942 in Nagykanizsa into an intellectual–artisan family. His mother was a teacher, while his father was a tradesman who tried his hand at many occupations over the course of his life: he worked as a butcher, a publican, a bricklayer, an employee of the Hungarian State Railways, and even as a miner, as the needs of the six-member family required. It is a peculiar paradox of fate that despite their modest material circumstances, for a long time the socialist system that replaced the “ancien régime” nevertheless treated the Tóth family as class-alien: nationalisation stripped them of their property, and later the discrimination associated with the classification of “other social origin” brought further disadvantages upon the family.
The town in which our master grew up enjoyed its heyday before 1945, as it was an important commercial hub along the so-called “Fiume route”. Owing to its proximity to the border, it played a key role in the trade of agricultural produce and livestock towards Yugoslavia and Italy, and further on towards the Mediterranean. Its regional significance was further enhanced by the discovery of oil and natural gas deposits in the surrounding area, the exploitation of which led to the establishment of an American–Hungarian joint-stock company known as MAORT. Through the company’s activities, an oil-industry machinery factory was built in the town, and a modern-looking housing estate was also created to accommodate workers employed both at the factory and at the oil fields; strolling in the surrounding park became a favoured leisure activity of Nagykanizsa’s youth. After 1945, however, the situation changed abruptly: the once vibrant settlement became something of a dormitory town. Domestic policies hostile towards Yugoslavia put a brake on more substantial development; although a glass factory and a brush factory continued to operate, and Tungsram also relocated one of its divisions there, the prosperous MAORT years came to an end for a long time. As an elementary school pupil interested in the natural sciences, and in the absence of institutions offering vocational training, his parents enrolled him in a grammar school; fortunately, as the legal successor of the former Piarist senior grammar school, this institution provided a high-quality education thanks to several former priest-teachers who had since become laymen. It was during drawing classes and extracurricular activities here that the desire to pursue a career in interior architecture awoke in Tibor Tóth, although, as he later recalled, he himself no longer knows what specific impulses lay behind this decision. It therefore seemed natural that after obtaining his school-leaving certificate in 1960, he should apply for admission to the interior architecture programme at the Hungarian College of Applied Arts.
He was not admitted, as his performance in the practical examinations was only moderate. His drawing skills and modelling abilities were underdeveloped, and a certain provincial diffidence also worked against him. He felt inhibited by the fact that some of his fellow applicants from the capital presented work that appeared more assured than his own. The rejection nevertheless did not embitter him; rather, it hardened his resolve. He decided to try again, but so that the intervening time should not be wasted, he resolved to learn a trade. He became an apprentice pattern-maker, carpenter and later metal lathe operator at the local unit of the Oil Industry Machinery Factory, while also attending drawing courses run by a painter living in Nagykanizsa, Ferenc Semenyei. In 1961, however, the entrance examination once again ended in failure. On this occasion the problem was no longer his skills, since he had achieved the required score, but his conduct. He became involved in a disagreement over the interpretation of a political question with one of the members of the admissions committee, Professor Antal Vass, who took offence at his assertiveness. The incident affected him deeply, yet his determination remained unbroken. He continued to seek a way forward with perseverance. His colleagues at the factory convinced him that in order to progress he should change not only his workplace but even his city, since he had already exhausted what Nagykanizsa could offer. Thus arose the idea of requesting a transfer to the company’s Gyömrői Road unit in Budapest, while at the same time taking advantage of the opportunity to pursue further training at the capital’s independent art schools. In 1962, after some hesitation, the move to Budapest took place, a decision which later proved to have been the right one in every respect. In late spring of 1962, the young metal lathe operator, now hardened both intellectually and emotionally, to the delight of his fellow workers, was admitted to the college’s interior architecture programme as one of eleven successful candidates out of 210 applicants.
The interior articulation and furnishing of buildings – popularly referred to as making them liveable – is by no means a recent invention; such endeavours have a history spanning several millennia. In fact, this is where culture itself begins. That this activity could be pursued not merely in a spontaneous manner, guided solely by considerations of practicality and usability, but also consciously and with artistic ambition, only became widespread with the advancement of craftsmanship and, later, with the rise of industrial civilisation. The handling of new materials, forms and technologies increasingly required specialised knowledge and expertise, and thus, in the second half of the nineteenth century, in parallel with the material enrichment of certain social strata and the growing expectations placed on housing, the profession of the interior decorator emerged. From this, in turn, developed a new branch of applied art: interior architecture, whose vocation is the professional rethinking of a given architectural space, and the deliberate design of its details and internal material environment.
Its establishment in Hungary, and the launch of its formal teaching, coincided with the organisation of domestic art education through the founding of the Országos Magyar Királyi Mintarajztanoda és Rajztanárképezde (National Royal Hungarian Model Drawing School and Teacher Training Institute). From this institution, founded in 1870 by Gusztáv Keleti, there emerged in 1880 the Országos Magyar Királyi Iparművészeti Tanoda (National Royal Hungarian School of Applied Arts), regarded as the direct predecessor of today’s academy. During its first three years, it consisted of no more than a single workshop for artistic wood carving, where, in accordance with Keleti’s stated aim of providing “school-based support for a more artistically oriented wood and furniture industry”, seven students were taught under the direction of Lajos Mátrai-Muderlak. This initial, almost telegraphic programme was gradually expanded and modernised over the years, not least under the influence of Western European systems of industrial education inspired by industrial development, whose initiators were the newly established museums of applied arts. England took the lead in the development of applied arts schools combined with museums: it was there, within the South Kensington Museum, that the first courses were launched in which, alongside artistic craftsmanship, attempts were also made to teach the technical arts, following the ideas of the émigré German architect Gottfried Semper. Semper, incidentally, also popularised these concepts in book form in 1852 under the title Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst, a work that reached Keleti as well. Ultimately, however, Keleti found the most directly applicable model closer to home, in Vienna, where the Museum für Industrie und Kunst, following the Kensington example, likewise opened a school in 1864 to promote the art of ornament, distinct from the fine arts. It was therefore no coincidence that Keleti envisaged the activity of the Iparművészeti Tanoda, later the Iparművészeti Iskola, in close cooperation with the Mintarajztanoda and the Iparművészeti Múzeum (Museum of Applied Arts), founded in 1872. This collaboration explains why, after a temporary sojourn in Terézváros, the institution eventually moved in 1896 into the newly inaugurated palace of the museum itself. The museum’s collections and exhibitions served as an important didactic base for teaching, intended not only to advance the training of craftsmen but also to cultivate the taste of the broader public who used and lived among these objects. Admission to the wood-carving workshop was open to any applicant over the age of fifteen who had completed four years of secondary schooling; alongside practical workshop training, the curriculum included architectural drawing and applied arts design, supplemented by geometry, freehand perspective and ornamental drawing. In 1884, on the basis of accumulated experience, the educational structure was reorganised: the duration of training was extended to five years, with the original three-year vocational programme preceded by a two-year preparatory course. In 1890, the workshop was transformed into a residential interior design section aimed at the further training of goldsmiths and upholsterers, and from this there emerged in 1899, now with 120 students, the Lakásművészeti Szakosztály (Department of Interior Arts), developed out of the furniture design specialisation.
The intellectual ferment of the years around the turn of the century opened a new chapter in the history of the school. The modern aspirations and stylistic movements emerging at the time, the newly discovered traditions of folk art, and the inspiring force of the English Arts and Crafts Movement, which sought to harmonise art and craftsmanship, gradually called into question the academic approach to education and the practice of copying and reproducing the motif repertory of historical styles. The rejection of the aesthetic and representational values of the antique–Renaissance tradition, long regarded as stable and authoritative and grounded in mimesis, manifested itself most visibly in the fine arts, yet its impact also reached the realm of applied arts thinking. Here, too, closeness to nature and to lived experience became a requirement, along with a pragmatic interpretation of applied artistic activity that went beyond its traditional decorative and representative functions. In light of these developments, the debate that had been unfolding across Europe concerning the authorship of artistic objects was also resolved in Hungary: namely, whether creative status belonged to the designer of an object or to its practical maker. It became clear that priority did not lie with the craftsman but with the designer, since the artistic character of an object was understood as the product of the latter’s creative imagination. As a consequence of this recognition, the former system of advanced artisan training necessarily gave way to education conceived as artistic training, which, of course, still could not dispense with technical and technological knowledge.
The task of reorganisation fell to the new directors who succeeded Keleti after his retirement in the millennium year: the architect Kamill Fittler, and later Elemér Czakó, who replaced him in 1910. Through the partly direct and partly indirect application of English experiences, both contributed significantly to the domestic emancipation of applied art, and within that to the loosening of its traditional craft-centred orientation. In line with the intentions of English theorists of the issue (Ruskin, Morris, Ashbee, Crane, among others), they themselves sought to promote the teaching of an art adapted to industry, in which self-contained classroom design was replaced by a creative methodology integrated into the elements of industrial life. For, as Czakó emphasised, in the vocation of the applied artist “the two different forces of technology and art are united, one of which impels the restless, ever-wandering search for beauty, while the other calls for sober, calculating rationality”. Their aim, therefore, was to develop one-sided artistic education into a workshop-based school. In this spirit, among other measures, the carpet-weaving workshop in Gödöllő founded by Aladár Körösfői Krisch was attached to the school in 1907, and the curriculum was once again reorganised: the former preparatory and vocational training was replaced by a system consisting of a three-year secondary-level course and a two-year higher-education course, the former concluding with a final certificate, the latter with a professional diploma.
The acceptance of the workshop-school approach owed much to the architect Dénes Györgyi, who joined the work of the institution from the academic year 1909–10 as a lecturer in the Interior Design Department established in 1904. As a proponent of the close affinity between applied arts and architecture, Györgyi conceived residential art as an architectural genre, and in 1917, with the collaboration of the distinguished designer Ferenc Szablya-Frischauf, he developed an educational programme that integrated the tasks of the department into the framework of architecture. He held that an interior designer could only fulfil his vocation if he worked in cooperation with the architect of the building to be furnished, and indeed if he himself was conversant with the laws of architecture – that is, if within certain limits he also functioned as an architect. As he explained in his petition addressed to the Magyar Mérnök és Építészegylet (Hungarian Association of Engineers and Architects): “The interior art department no longer contents itself with enabling students merely to draw and construct individual items of furnishing, but also equips them with the ability to design entire interiors: workers’, apprentices’ and middle-class dwellings and rooms, commercial, hotel and industrial interiors, as well as complete family houses and villas, together with the related decorative tasks.” In order to realise this concept, he devised an educational methodology whose pillars were workshop practice, structural instruction, and artistic training combined with technical drawing. Accordingly, in the first two years students acquired proficiency in the design and execution of simple objects and pieces of furniture; in the third year they focused on the complex artistic design of dwellings, taking account of details; while in the fourth and fifth years the subject matter expanded to comprehensive design that treated architectural and interior design tasks as an integrated whole, ranging from individual building types to small-scale housing estates. Given that the coherent shaping of space demands the same formal logic from both interior and architectural designers, Györgyi redefined the concept of interior furnishing: in his system of values, the interior designer was no longer subordinate to the architect but an equal partner, an “applied artist of construction”, whose social status was equivalent to that of the fine artist and the engineer.
Györgyi’s reform-oriented pedagogy remained influential in the period between the two world wars as well, although its full development was hindered by the fact that, owing to the country’s shaken post-Trianon situation, the equipment investments planned in the late 1910s – including the establishment of a well-equipped woodworking training workshop – failed to materialise. A significant improvement in this respect occurred only in the mid-1930s, under the directorship of Ferenc Szablya-Frischauf (1936–1943), who took steps towards transforming the institution into an academy. Some degree of consolidation had nevertheless already taken place in 1924, when the school received a new statute, within the framework of which the number of specialisations was set at seven (headed by the applied architectural arts department corresponding to today’s interior architecture programme), and the duration of studies was extended to six years. Gradual modernisation was further encouraged by the conceptual renaissance triggered by the domestic spread of Bauhaus principles in the field of object design, as well as by the fact that several former students trained by Györgyi had meanwhile gained influence in artistic public life, and some of them – among them Gyula Kaesz and Károly Weichiger – were even appointed to teaching positions. The curriculum of the applied architectural arts department, admission to which from 1943 onwards required a secondary school leaving certificate, comprised the following subjects: furniture design, workshop practice, public building studies, interior articulation, building industry design, the Hungarian home, and single-family house design. Some progress was also made regarding the legal status of the profession: in 1927 a law was enacted providing copyright protection for the work of applied architectural artists.
The progressive artists who embraced the ideals of the Bauhaus (spatial thinking, standardisation, serial production, and the like) stated unequivocally in their 1940 manifesto entitled Új magyar iparművészet felé (Towards a New Hungarian Applied Art) that applied art, if it wished to function as a force shaping society, had to enter into a far closer alliance with industry than ever before. Accordingly, the guiding principle of education could be nothing other than the promotion of direct industrial applicability, with the aim of creating “modern Hungarian tools of everyday life” and even “new Hungarian ways of living”. In the wake of the manifesto, several concrete proposals were put forward for rethinking the curriculum and teaching material, one of which was advanced precisely by the school’s interior architecture lecturer, Gyula Kaesz. The war interrupted but did not break this process of transformation, for in 1946 the institution – which in the meantime had been raised to academy status, and in 1948 to a five-year college-level programme – came under the leadership of a committed reformer, the architect and furniture designer Lajos Kozma. He sought to preserve all those traditions that had proved positive in applied arts education before 1919 and during the interwar period. After his unexpected death (26 November 1948), the well-known textile designer Ernő Schubert became director. As an industry-oriented creator, he correctly recognised that the new demands arising from the country’s industrialisation could no longer be met on a craft-based foundation. With the support of Gyula Kaesz, head of the Interior Design Main Department, which encompassed furniture design and interior architecture alike, he therefore reorganised education along “production-oriented” lines: in all professional fields, designer-artists were trained who, upon completing their studies, would supply factories with aesthetically refined and easily reproducible models. It soon became clear, however, that this concept was viable only to a limited extent. Students did indeed learn how to design, but since their models were executed not by themselves but by manufacturing plants, their knowledge of materials and technologies remained fragmentary. Later, under Kaesz’s own directorship (1953–1958), the technical content of education was rehabilitated, for if anyone understood that design and production could not be separated, it was he – the very person who had defined the concept of the industrially produced type-furniture. The interior architecture training shaped by Kaesz, resting on a broader general cultural foundation yet essentially retaining a workshop-based approach, shifted from 1964 onwards to a university-type, architecturally grounded educational system, one that aimed to shape architectural form and the interior world and details of architectural space in an integrated manner. The former departments were replaced by institutes, and the newly established Department of Architecture was staffed with a faculty drawn from the strongest professionals of the period, headed by the architect-engineer György Szrogh.
When Tibor Tóth thus began his college studies in the autumn of 1963, the introduction of a “complex architectural training” appropriate to the spirit of the age was already on the agenda. Although the duration of the programme was reduced to four, and later to four and a half years, it nevertheless underwent a substantial qualitative transformation. Szrogh defined the aim of education as “the development of creative design abilities in the field of shaping the human environment”, which on the one hand took form in the design of various objects serving environmental formation and in their technical and artistic resolution, and on the other hand in the theoretical understanding and practical application of the specific problems of spatial formation and spatial organisation. The acquisition of the outlined competencies proceeded in three stages. First, students became acquainted with the structural system of buildings and with the space-forming structures of interior space, initially on a theoretical level and subsequently through concrete design tasks. This was followed by the elaboration of interrelations through the independent design of a smaller object that constituted a transition between object and building, such as a pavilion. Finally, in the third stage, programmes were realised in which the design task appeared in its full complexity: beyond architectural and interior architectural formation, the given building complex also had to be integrated into its broader environment, whether an artificial or a natural landscape. Through this approach – according to the programme’s authors – it became possible to appropriate the entire domain of architecture, “from the standpoint of conceptual scope, from object design to the principles of settlement organisation, and from the standpoint of practical limits, to the material structural, mechanical and industrial realisation of an object”. Graduates trained in this way could, upon leaving the college, participate as co-designers in tasks requiring engineering expertise, and act as designers providing complete solutions in cases where such expertise was not required.
Despite the promising nature of the concept, during the 1960s the character of the training remained strongly art-centred and empirically oriented. In order to lay the foundations of the necessary professional routine, considerable time was devoted to deepening students’ visual literacy and broadening their artistic horizons. Even in the specialised design and materials studies, the aesthetic approach to the object to be designed and its plastic articulation predominated; and although, alongside modes of individual craftsmanship, the specific constructive and design methodology of large-scale industrial serial production also emerged as a subject in its own right, relatively little was said about the philosophy of form design as a creative practice, or about the role of its related auxiliary disciplines – with the partial exception of sociology. For the most part, these were only integrated into the curriculum around 1967–1968, in the more relaxed intellectual climate that followed the introduction of the New Economic Mechanism, or even later, after the college was elevated to university status in 1971, when Marxist cultural policy came to recognise that ergonomics, systems theory or value analysis were not merely capitalist artifices, but important drivers of economic efficiency in design. (It is telling that in 1974 the college’s then rector, Endre Gádor, no longer considered interior architectural training based on “grand architecture” to be expedient, and instead regarded as authoritative the practice “which also takes into account the regularities of object design and is grounded in the contemporary methods of industrial design”.)
In an interview, Tibor Tóth Pál recalled his university years as follows: “Of course we were aware that form design, design as such, existed, since a specialisation and department bearing this name operated at the college in connection with toolmaking and mechanical engineering. We architecture students, however, did not use a designation such as furniture industrial design; architectural form design, all the more so. We did, however, speak of object design, which in a certain sense moved within the constraints of the wood industry – that is, we had to design chairs, tables, stools, cradles, garden furniture and everything else of that kind, and alongside this we received from our teachers, István Németh and Ede Kimle, all the necessary knowledge relating to structural construction. Joints, mortises, woodworking techniques and everything else – naturally in parallel with the design of the specific objects. This was how things went in the first two years. Then, from the third year onwards, a rigorous architectural design structure was introduced. Our professor, György Szrogh, taught us that one must break the small down from the large. One has to sense the large – that is, the architectural volume – and think in terms of the simultaneity of environment, building and interior space, progressing along this path all the way to the design of furniture. I was in my third year when I had to design a boathouse on the Római-part, the Roman Bank of the Danube. This was fundamentally an architectural challenge. It had to accommodate 250 boats – kayaks, canoes, and so on – and include sleeping facilities, a communal space, workshops, a gym; there had to be bathrooms and showers, and the whole thing had to have a somewhat holiday-like character. A kind of club house. The windows were to face the Danube. I also had to design elevated points within the building from which race judges could follow the competitions unfolding on the river. Finally, I had to design furniture for the rooms that suited the function of a boathouse. It was interesting, useful work – eighty per cent architectural and only twenty per cent furniture design. In fact, one could call all this form design, since the final result, the boathouse, was assembled from interrelated component elements that could, in certain respects, also be varied. Such complex tasks almost spontaneously made us aware of the advantages of typification, even though we did not delve particularly deeply into the question of type formation, especially the typification of architectural elements.”
A similar situation prevailed with regard to systems design as well. There was likewise no course explicitly devoted to this aim, yet design practice nonetheless compelled such an approach. I myself truly grasped what designing in systems meant during the preparation of my diploma project. It concerned a single-storey family house based on an element-based, prefabricated panel system; from these panels various forms of site layout had to be articulated – terraced houses, semi-detached houses, atrium houses, and so on. The panels themselves also had to be structurally designed, as it was from these structures that the buildings could be assembled. The essence of the task lay in devising a modular system of appropriate dimensions, determining how functions could be accommodated within it, and how it could provide space for families of two, four, or ten people. All of this had to be worked out with the utmost architectural precision, because Ferenc Vámossy, the lecturer in building structures, checked every single architectural and structural solution I devised. To the interior space thus formed and articulated, furniture then had to be designed, the adequacy of which in relation to the architectural space was assessed by Professor Németh. As a student, I liked this architecturally grounded mode of design; once I entered professional life, however, I had to experience that such strong architectural embeddedness could also lead to one-sidedness, for example by inhibiting the full assertion of specifically interior-design values. To sum up: architecture and interior architecture should be aligned more in a spiritual or conceptual sense than in a purely technical one. On this point we received no clear instruction; the prevailing architectural concept rather forced technical conformity. At the same time, it was no small contradiction that the college’s external connections were highly contingent. We truly lived in an ivory tower. In our education there was no mention at all of what industry was doing outside. There was no one who would have said: go and take a look around. No one showed us, through slides, photographs or brochures, what was happening in the factories, nor did anyone tell us to visit furniture shops, to look closely and draw what we saw there. In short: real-life relevance was excluded. We were not prepared either for competition or for market-oriented design. As a former skilled worker, this passivity disturbed me; at times I even wondered whether our professionally successful teachers might be trying, in this way, to push us – their future competitors – off the field. It was almost inevitable that our early careers began with setbacks and conflicts, often with disillusioning encounters, and this applied especially to those few who, like myself, chose factory-based work rather than employment in design institutes.
If one considers only the formal circumstances, Tibor Tóth Pál stepped out through the gates of the college at a fortunate moment: 1968 marked a kind of watershed in the economic history of Hungary, which had chosen the socialist path in 1945. After long years of a resource-depleting, autarkic industrial policy, the party-state leadership then resolved to embark on the modernisation of the socio-economic structure and to reintegrate into the global economy a country that, as a result of distortions, had been cut off from the worldwide currents of science, technology, technical innovation and capital transfer. In order to remedy the disadvantages of the previously dominant rigid planned economy, a more flexible system of economic organisation and governance was introduced, granting enterprises greater room for manoeuvre – a system that entered contemporary public discourse under the name “new economic mechanism”. Since a certain degree of intellectual and public liberalisation had already begun around the turn of the 1950s and 1960s – thanks to the smaller and larger concessions of the conciliatory policy following the suppression of the 1956 revolution – the promised economic reforms aroused serious expectations within society; it seemed that there was hope for correction in material terms as well, for accelerating the long-desired catching-up process. Although reality soon dispelled this illusion, the rise of a pragmatically minded industrial policy, replacing earlier rigidity and opening towards consumer goods, perceptibly accelerated development, leading to a rapid transformation of everyday life. By the late 1960s, and even more so by the early 1970s, economic performance resulted in a relatively acceptable standard of living which, supplemented by full employment, ensured a modest but secure livelihood. The demand for more attractive goods and a broader range of products thus emerged as a legitimate social expectation.
The optimistic spirit of the age also acted as a ferment within the furniture industry, which, thanks to successive housing construction programmes, did not suffer from a lack of demand; yet owing to its technological and intellectual backwardness, its output was largely confined to meeting quantitative expectations to varying degrees of adequacy. This state of affairs stemmed from three causes: the post-1945 nationalisation of the domestic furniture industry; the top-down, ideologically driven industrial policy of the 1950s, which treated production as a statistical issue; and the fact that no significant investment took place in the furniture sector either during the Three-Year Plan or the First Five-Year Plan. As is well known, following nationalisation the smaller and larger furniture factories were merged into large enterprises which, much like their poorly equipped predecessors, likewise lacked modern machinery. To manage them, first the Furniture Industry Directorate responsible for production matters was established, followed in 1950 by the Wood Industry Production Organisation and Design Office, which, as the representative of official taste norms that disregarded the modernist legacy, centrally determined the form and appearance of serially produced furniture through officially approved standard designs. As a result of this centralisation, which severed production from design, both furniture and furniture style became objects – and victims – of ideological directives: production efficiency was defined exclusively by quantitative criteria, while style was shaped not by functionality serving consumer needs, but by simplicity and cheapness of manufacture. Although the term “standard furniture” was used, in reality this amounted to uniform mass furniture, since one of the most important attributes of genuine standard furniture – quality – never became a requirement, given that everything could be sold. Directed design envisaged the large-scale production of only four or five types, which led to a severely limited range and to the neglect of aesthetic and ergonomic considerations. The Third National Exhibition of Applied Arts held in 1953, where professional applied art was indiscriminately merged with folk art and so-called folk applied art, clearly demonstrated the failure of these conceptions.
After 1956 the situation changed to the extent that ideological compulsion was lifted, and thanks to a few more ambitious designers – mostly former students of Kaesz who had graduated in the mid-1950s – the furniture palette became somewhat more varied. Supply thus increased, yet owing to technical and technological backwardness, as well as the still-prevailing production obligations, industry was only marginally able to integrate creative intent into the rigid order of technical planning, and shortages therefore persisted. A real turning point came only in 1960, when the launch of the fifteen-year housing construction programme, envisaging one million new dwellings, made a certain degree of development in the by then completely untenable furniture industry unavoidable. Housing factories operating with panel technology industrialised residential construction, and the rapidly erected housing estates generated enormous demand for furniture adapted to the character and size of the flats. Production volumes rose sharply, but the structure of output and the range of products followed this development only slowly, since factories living under the spell of demand had little incentive to engage in design work – their revenues, and the bonuses of their managers, still depended primarily on quantity. The period nevertheless already produced a few examples of large-scale industrially manufactured standard furniture, such as János Bodnár’s Panni fala (Panni wall unit) or László Heczendorfer’s living-room suite marketed under the name Napfény (Sunlight).
This state of affairs persisted until 1968, until the introduction of the New Economic Mechanism, which undoubtedly broadened the range of possibilities, albeit for the time being largely on a theoretical level. Factories attempted to appear on the market with furniture collections of their own design, yet since the conditions of material procurement and production remained essentially unchanged, everything stayed much as it had been before. This proved all the more of a restraining factor because, in the meantime, furniture production in the West had been completely transformed by the advent of new materials and technologies: fibreboard replaced solid wood, so-called particleboard and laminated veneer came into widespread use, various plastic and cellulose surface coverings spread, and modular корпус furniture assembled from panel elements that could be freely combined became the norm. Tibor Tóth, who undertook factory-based design work, was of course unaware of all this; as an outsider, he believed that his future workplace, the large-scale Kanizsa Bútorgyár in Nagykanizsa (Kanizsa Furniture Factory), possessed all the knowledge that a twentieth-century furniture factory ought to have. Naturally, he was soon disillusioned, experiencing first-hand the very contradictions that at the time beset the Hungarian furniture industry.
Tibor Tóth came to Nagykanizsa for prosaic reasons: his family lived there, and it therefore seemed self-evident that upon receiving his diploma he would seek employment in the Zala region. He had no inclination towards working in a design institute or a public authority, so factory work was the only realistic option. At the time, two larger furniture factories operated in the county: the Zala factory in Zalaegerszeg and the Kanizsa factory in Nagykanizsa, and it was natural that he chose the latter. “What also impressed me, of course,” the artist recalls, “was that as someone originating from the town, they were counting on me; already around the time of my diploma defence a delegation approached me to enquire about my plans. In June I travelled down to look around and introduce myself, and since what I saw appealed to me, I accepted the factory’s offer and began work in September 1968. I will not deny that I have little good to say about the first few years; perhaps the only positive was that I managed, once and for all, to clarify my role within the factory – I made it clear that I had come as a designer and had no intention of allowing that status to be called into question. Why was this necessary? From hearsay I already knew that within factory hierarchies the position of design and designers was rather unstable; in many places industrial designers were employed as technical administrators or quality inspectors, and it sometimes happened that their talent was used not to deepen innovation but to disguise outdated technical parameters of products. More than one factory manager regarded artists as a cost-increasing factor, and even when they employed them, this was often motivated not by necessity but by the personal interest of one or two directors receptive to technical culture. Fortunately, this was not the case in Kanizsa: there they genuinely counted on my contribution, and both the workforce and the management were aware of the significance of design. This mutual sympathy later proved advantageous in many respects, as we were able to understand one another on professional matters and avoid bad compromises. A design that is realised without the agreement of the engineers can never be of full value.”
And now something from among the unpleasant memories. In matters of raw materials one could rely only on domestic industry, primarily on the timber sector, which was in just as poor a state as furniture manufacturing itself. Materials with which genuinely new forms and contemporary design might have been created were either unavailable or obtainable only with great difficulty. One visit has remained an indelible memory for me: our trip to the LATEX factory in Szombathely, which at the time was virtually the sole manufacturer and supplier of upholstery fabrics, and where the range was, for all practical purposes, limited to a single knitted textile, the strong and thick épinglé. It was a load-bearing, durable product, but working with it was a torment. For the upholstered furniture I had envisaged, I had intended soft wool fabrics, and when I voiced this idea, they laughed heartily at my naïveté. Why would they change their production profile when factories were already queuing up even for épinglé? A similar narrowness characterised the procurement of furniture boards as well, whose principal supplier was the likewise Szombathely-based FALKO. They produced only a single type of board, the 19 mm furniture panel, from which it was hardly possible to create any marvels of furniture design. There were shortages of fittings and colouring agents, and for some mysterious reason the overwhelming majority of furniture was dominated by dark walnut and mahogany veneers.
Although Kanizsa Bútorgyár (Kanizsa Furniture Factory), with its workforce of some 950 employees, counted as a sizeable plant, it too operated with ageing, run-down machinery. With such a machine park, production could necessarily extend only to traditional, schematic forms. One particularly sought-after product, for instance, was the light-coloured rekaimé. Manual labour remained extensive, which rendered upholstered furniture production especially uneconomical. Polyurethane foam, being an imported material, was scarcely obtainable, so we struggled instead with cone springs, textile webbing, horsehair and quilted textile padding. With such materials, proper, clean closures were naturally impossible to achieve; hence the prevalence of decorative trims that covered the furniture, as these were virtually the only means by which the closures could be concealed.
As far as design was concerned, the factory already had a few in-house creations, yet in terms of product development production relied primarily on the types offered by the Faipari Gyártásszervező és Szerkesztő Iroda (Wood Industry Production Organisation and Design Office). Among these there were successful individual pieces and ensembles, such as the four-variant Kanizsa lakószoba (Kanizsa Living Room) designed by László Mózer. After spending one or two months familiarising myself thoroughly with the individual departments of the factory – the panel-cutting shop, the veneer workshop, the hardwood processing unit and the upholstery workshop – my first assignment was precisely to refresh and update certain elements of the Mózer-designed sets; within this framework I redesigned some of the pieces of Kanizsa IV, namely the table and the chairs. To this day I am proud that the company jury, consisting of the managing director, the chief engineer, and the commercial and technical directors, approved and accepted this redesign. As an independent project, I came forward with the design of a coffee table, for which I also prepared a 1:2 scale drawing. Despite the precise instructions, the workers altered the position of the cross-braces binding the base together, saying that “this is not how we are used to doing it”. Naturally, I had the table remanufactured in order to demonstrate the validity of my concept. The remade version convinced everyone, and there was thus no obstacle to producing a prototype and subsequently launching small-series production. Time passed in this way until 1970–1971, when, in order to address the accumulated problems, a government decision was taken on the reconstruction of the furniture industry. For close to two and a half billion forints, modern production lines purchased in Western Europe were installed in the major Hungarian furniture factories, including Kanizsa. Through this reconstruction Hungarian furniture manufacturing undeniably became large-scale industry; this, however, by no means implied that it thereby also became capable, in its new status, of producing type furniture in the modern sense so often advocated at the time. Unfortunately, it did not – although it is true that there was a period in the 1980s that seemed to hold out such hopes. Once again, however, the familiar socialist pattern asserted itself: something is set in motion, it functions after a fashion, and yet, in the end, nothing really happens.
The furniture-industry reconstruction carried out between 1970 and 1975 was a radical step, and if it had been organised with due care it might have yielded serious results. However, the opportunity was squandered right at the outset: for reasons of economy only the high-performance basic machines were purchased, while the purpose-built tools that constituted their essential complements were not. As a consequence, they also dispensed with those special milling units mountable on the production lines by means of which Italian and German manufacturers had already been able to reproduce, at an industrial level, the technical sophistication and aesthetic surplus of earlier workshop-based production. With identical technology one could inevitably manufacture only furniture of an identical character, made to the same template – a kind of mass commodity. Thus it came as a shock when, at the consumer-goods autumn fair that followed, it emerged that the output of the twelve factories equipped with twelve new production lines – the so-called “wall-to-wall furniture” – despite its acceptable quality, was disturbingly uniform, monotonous and mechanical.
The problem outlined above was further entrenched by the fact that a portion of the investment had to be financed by the factories themselves. To this end they generally took out bank loans, and since they wished to repay these debts as quickly as possible, change was not in their immediate interest. If a particular type of furniture sold well in large series, factories were reluctant even to introduce modifications, because uninterrupted production generated revenue, from which wages could be paid and materials purchased. In addition, reference could always be made to the limitations imposed by material supply and the existing machinery, which explained, among other things, the so-called 32-millimetre drilling system, as the available pneumatic tools were calibrated to this standard. Later, of course, as pressure eased, individual factories gradually acquired purpose-built machines that allowed for greater variety. This was prompted by considerations of prestige, the slowly emerging competition, various tentative moves towards specialisation, and ultimately by the increasingly forceful imperative of product development.
In truth, it was precisely in this latter field that the lag was greatest. Once production was running smoothly, factories grew complacent and tended to treat product development merely as a technical issue, entrusting design not to professional designers but to so-called “factory collectives” made up of technicians and engineers. When change became unavoidable, they adjusted machine settings, yet were reluctant to commit to more proportionate typification of components and to the flexibility that would have followed from it. It became clear that as a result of the stagnation of previous years, design itself had entered into crisis: reconstruction was not accompanied by a commensurate strengthening of the industry’s intellectual and material base – modern technology arrived sooner than modern thinking. In an attempt to stimulate innovation, the first step taken by industrial management was the reorganisation and modernisation of the Faipari Gyártásszervező és Szerkesztő Iroda (Wood Industry Production Organisation and Design Office). However, even the excellent designs produced by the institution, renamed Bútoripari Tervező Iroda (Furniture Industry Design Office), were unable to substitute for locally embedded design that could exploit specific factory conditions, or to resolve on a larger and more comprehensive scale the homogenised range of products, both in typological and functional terms. Some progress became possible only with considerable delay, after the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, when factory-based design studios began to be established. By that time, however, the New Economic Mechanism that had initiated decentralisation had already stalled and been withdrawn, while economic and intellectual processes were unfolding globally that fundamentally reshaped the world economy and led to a paradigmatic shift on the ideological plane as well. The negative effects of the first oil price shock of 1973–1974 and the second shock of 1979–1980 were countered by the capitalist world through the acceleration of the scientific and technological revolution; the Kádár regime, wary of social reforms, was unable to do the same, and despite its corrective intentions was soon overtaken by waves of recession. Losses stemming from the qualitative deficiencies of domestically manufactured industrial products multiplied, and by the end of the 1980s had reached a scale comparable to the devastation of the Second World War. Owing to Western loans and the insolvency of Eastern markets, the country became heavily indebted; the loss of perspective led to a crisis of values and ultimately to the collapse of the system. With the political transition, borders opened and Western products flooded in, with which Hungarian furniture factories, trapped in the methods of the old world, were unable to compete. Credit became more expensive, raw materials were liberalised in price, and there were no longer sufficient resources to invest in new, multifunctional machinery. All of this gradually undermined and exhausted the companies; debts accumulated to such an extent that only one way out remained: privatisation. While there are a few counterexamples, taken as a whole this process resulted in the marginalisation of Hungarian furniture design.
In issue no. 6 of 1971 of Ipari Művészet, György Fekete published a thought-provoking article entitled A lakáskultúra egysége (The Unity of Residential Culture), in which he argued for the necessity of maintaining a balance between the civilisational and humanistic contents that determine the quality of residential culture. According to Fekete, the key to achieving this balance lies in the continuous monitoring and coordination of those factors that influence material and intellectual development. “The fully realised whole can only be assembled from its constituent parts after the entire process has been organised as a unity”; in other words, only a clear understanding and conscious organisation of the interrelationship between social demand, design, production and commerce can ensure that, within the resulting circuit, each involved segment finds its proper place and function. In the absence of a comprehensive development plan and a steering policy aimed at satisfying enduring life functions, the chain of information linking these segments is inevitably broken, leading to short circuits, overlaps and, ultimately, to the disruption of equilibrium. This, Fekete concludes, is one of the underlying sources of the anomalies experienced on a daily basis in furniture production, such as overproduction or, conversely, unmet demand.
For us this text is important also because, in seeking an antidote to conceptual incoherence, it offers a precise assessment of the furniture needs of the 1970s and even defines the design, production and commercial steps presupposed by their satisfaction. The article identifies four types of demand, of which the greatest pressure comes from primary mass needs; this pressure can be managed and met only through constant readiness, to which design can respond by developing basic series serving essential life functions, while production and commerce can do so through the continuous manufacture and distribution of the developed types. The next level of demand is constituted by the public’s expectations for an expanded range of choice: here design can be effective through the presentation of variant types and individual pieces, production through small-series manufacture, and commerce through specialised methods of sale. The servicing of demands for novelty and fashion requires a creative attitude from all parties involved: from design the development of new structures and forms, from production their accelerated prototyping, and from commerce the imaginative introduction of experimental examples. Finally, there is always a segment of consumers who, for reasons of taste, prefer older solutions; in this case flexible adaptability is the appropriate response, taking shape in design through the renewal of historical stylistic features, in production through artisanal methods of execution, and on the commercial side through the demand-led supplementation of the product range. Beyond demonstrating with rare clarity the interdependence of artist, industry and market – which at the time was not yet evident to everyone – the outlined scheme also provides us with a useful point of reference for defining the creative status of Tibor Tóth. By virtue of his training and abilities it is indisputable that our master is capable of meeting every requirement placed on furniture; yet if we also consider the direction of his interests, he should primarily be regarded as an industrial designer specialising in large-scale furniture production, who not only constructs the outward appearance of the products he designs but also their structure and technical basis – that complex organism manifesting itself as form which is the true embodiment of a product’s functional and use-related values. According to Gyula Kaesz, the industrial designer is simultaneously artist and engineer, creating type-objects capable of serving the identical needs of the greatest number of people equally and in the best possible way. “The type is everyone’s formal solution,” writes Kaesz. Such collectively valid formal solutions can be conveyed to the broadest strata of society only through mechanical mass reproduction.
Furniture industrial design, which specialist literature most often defines as product development, is a relatively recent branch of design, since furniture as a type-object is itself a product of the first third of the twentieth century. Its emergence is inseparable from the expansion of constructivist industrial aesthetics during this period. Earlier, the term type furniture referred to poor or workers’ furniture; from the 1920s and 1930s onwards it came to mean an inexpensive, high-quality, variable factory series designed by an artist and intended to satisfy real needs. Industry-oriented furniture design, based on the standardisation of furniture components, had already existed in the nineteenth century, yet the aim of serial production at that time was not the search for a type beneficial to everyone, but mass production and the profits derived from it. The path towards mechanised production – and thus cheap mass manufacture – was opened by the brilliant invention of the German–Austrian chair manufacturer Michael Thonet (1796–1871): the bending of wood by means of steam treatment. This invention, patented in 1856, made it possible to standardise chair components and to vary serially produced standardised elements. Through these two operations, the most diverse chair forms could be created – or, if one prefers, designed. From the excellent furniture-historical work A magyar bútor 100 éve (One Hundred Years of Hungarian Furniture) by József Vadas we know that the Thonet method spread very rapidly throughout the countries of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and became particularly popular in Hungary, which possessed a large proportion of the beech forests suitable for bending. It is therefore no coincidence that mechanical reproduction soon gained ground in the production of case furniture as well: the leading product of the Első Magyar Faáru és Bútorgyár (First Hungarian Timber and Furniture Factory), founded in 1864 by Károly Lingel, was already a modular office bookcase assembled from elements. The idea of standardisation acquired its modern meaning in the twentieth century through the machine-production-oriented initiatives of the modern movement and subsequently through the theoretical and practical activity of the famous workshop school in Weimar founded by Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus. It was here that it was definitively articulated that the precondition of all forms of mass production is typification: the construction of the product to be manufactured in such a way that the combined factors of material, purpose, structure and applied technology give rise to a form suited to the requirements of serial production. This form may be termed a type-object, model or prototype; the essential point is that it is here that those characteristics are worked out which are repeated in the course of reproduction and which, when combined with other likewise standard elements, become capable of variation.
The factory designer – and thus Tibor Tóth as well – does not focus on the uniqueness of execution, but on the conditions of serial production when conceiving and constructing a piece of furniture. In practical terms, this means that during the design process he builds on those constituent elements of the product’s formal structure from which building units, modules, and systems derived from their structural interconnections can be formed, making it possible to generate several type variants of different sizes and characters from a single basic type by placing the typified (standardised) structural elements into new contexts. Specialist literature refers to this kind of design method, which proceeds from the structure of objects and is often described as “flexible”, as system-based or systems-oriented design, and regards its greatest advantage as lying in the fact that, while making production extraordinarily economical and shortening it in time, design understood in this way is capable of satisfying a wide range of lifestyles, comfort requirements and functional needs. Whereas within the framework of traditional, intuitive design the designer deals with only a single product at a time, the new method allows for the development of entire systems of functionally coordinated products – so-called product families – in which, in simplified and integrated form, all those structural components appear that would otherwise have to be designed and realised separately, at considerable intellectual and material cost; moreover, it also opens up the possibility of creating so-called package-type assembly units, modular cabinet systems. As a result of this integration, the production process itself is also simplified: a single technology and tool set suffices to produce the various variants. In short, our master thinks in terms of furniture families from the outset, that is, he designs prototypes which, both structurally and in terms of production, form the basis of a furniture collection of similar construction but variable formal articulation. From his type-objects such systems can be organised, which can exist not only in their own right but also as components of a further system; from them suites, furniture sets, and even complete interiors can be created – now with an explicit aim of shaping the environment.
Tibor Tóth’s talent is demonstrated by the fact that over the course of his design career spanning from 1970 to 2003 – 27 years of which he spent at the Kanizsa Furniture Factory – nearly 180 prototypes emerged from his hands, around 80 per cent of which entered serial production, mostly in the very year of their design, in some cases in runs of several tens of thousands. From the modular корпус furniture family marketed under the name Mozaik (Mosaic), the factory generated revenues of 227.5 million forints, while the modular upholstered furniture family marketed as Nelli brought in 342 million forints; the total income generated by his furniture designs amounted to several billion forints. The effectiveness of his oeuvre is further evidenced by the roughly two dozen professional prizes and distinctions he received, including the Grand Prize of the Industrial Design Council, the Mihály Munkácsy Prize, and the title of Meritorious Artist. Furniture design, however, represents only one segment of his professional activity: as an interior architect he also inscribed his name into our more recent cultural history, and as an arts organiser, cultural policy actor and art educator he remains to this day a recognised figure in artistic public life. Even a merely outline-level overview of his multifaceted life’s work places no small burden on the critic, yet the effort invested is amply rewarded by the opportunity to become acquainted, through his person, with one of the most inventive figures of contemporary Hungarian design.
Like all artistic activities, the quality of furniture industrial design depends primarily on the designer’s talent, creativity and sensitivity to form; yet the mere possession of these qualities does not in itself guarantee originality, or the emergence of a substantive or formal novelty. Anyone who seeks to create something new, something different from all previous achievements, must possess a solid body of theoretical and practical knowledge – one might even say a personal philosophy of art. This philosophy, of course, cannot detach itself from reality: it must take account of the functional, industrial, market-related and other constraints associated with furniture, while at the same time it cannot dispense with a degree of abstraction from these constraints, with vision, since artistic furniture is just as much an artefact, a medium, as a painting or a sculpture, in which the spirit of the age and the individuality of the creator are equally manifest. Given that, as already noted, the college education of the 1960s was primarily oriented towards the training of artists, instruction inevitably focused on the visual aspects of object design, on the composition of mentally conceived structures, while the subsequent stages of becoming a product, and in particular the question of large-scale industrial manufacturability, were addressed only tangentially. It is characteristic that aspiring designers were taught neither design history nor design theory; in terms of materials, technology and formal knowledge they could rely largely only on Gyula Kaesz’s handbook on furniture styles and on their studies in art history. It is undeniable that the cultural-historical heritage – especially with regard to the classical periods – could be learned from these sources, yet the picture thus obtained no longer reflected the recent past, and even less the present; in other words, insight into developments of the second half of the twentieth century was largely lacking. The country’s ideological isolation also constituted a significant informational constraint: travel and the acquisition of first-hand experience were either impossible or only very limited, which narrowed the possibilities of acquiring the market knowledge indispensable for orientation and effectively precluded alignment with current furniture trends. What was new and forward-looking on the Western European scene of the furniture profession reached Hungary with a delay of four to five years; consequently, learning, self-education and the compensation for knowledge gaps caused by prevailing circumstances became a permanent programme for Tibor Tóth’s generation. That our master’s integration into industry nevertheless proceeded smoothly, and was realised earlier than for most of his contemporaries, can be attributed above all to his exceptional technical aptitude and visual sensitivity: being versed in several trades, he had no difficulty in comprehending the technical issues of serial production and in finding their optimal solutions. Owing to their simplicity and inventiveness, his very first works already met with favourable critical and public reception, and later – precisely because of the skills outlined above – he came forward with structural and technical innovations that, in their own time, had the force of genuine revelations.
Large-scale furniture manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s was confined to a relatively narrow range of product types, within which case furniture clearly predominated. The flagship product was the modular wall unit measuring 3–4 metres in length and 175 cm in height, whose structural scheme could incorporate the following units (elements, modules): a two-door wardrobe cabinet with a depth of 58 cm; lower and upper wardrobe rows; open, glazed or closed shelving sections of varying height and depth; a television compartment; a drinks cabinet; drawer units; an integrated writing desk or a bed that could be used as seating during the day; as well as a cornice and plinth unifying the individual units. The plinth could take the form of a 12 cm closed base or a 15 cm high open base. Depending on their function, the elements – sometimes box-like and enclosed, sometimes open – were stacked beside or above one another in any desired order, most often assembled by the purchaser of the wall unit according to personal taste and the surrounding interior, using the assembly instructions supplied by the factory. Naturally, a given wall-unit type did not become variable solely through the rearrangement of its elements; type variants could also be created by changing materials and colours, overall character and spatial components, yet such solutions were rarely implemented, as procurement and stock-management constraints meant that factories could not afford this degree of variation. The popularity of wall units (the illustrated 1978 catalogue of BÚTORÉRT lists almost fifty types) was explained by the small size of apartments, typically 50–57 square metres: a functionally rich and adaptable wall unit could replace several other pieces of furniture, resulting in significant space savings. Wall-unit combinations – or their individual elements – could also be purchased separately, but most often they were marketed as part of a complete living-room ensemble bearing a brand name, thereby defining the character of the entire furnishing. If the wall unit did not include a built-in bed, the designer would typically provide for one or two daybeds with headboard and footboard (dimensions: 86 × 196 cm), a coffee table and two armchairs. Later, a sofa that could also function as a bed was added to the armchairs, and the furnishing could be supplemented with a chest of drawers or a chest-bed; in bedrooms separated from the living room, a double bed with storage and bedside tables were standard. Given the lack of space, dining tables and chairs could only be accommodated in living rooms to a very limited extent, and additional accessories were likewise restricted to an occasional floor lamp or plant stand.
In terms of furniture types and their numerical distribution, Tibor Tóth’s design repertoire does not differ substantially from the average of his period: like many of his contemporaries, his portfolio is dominated by wall units, living-room ensembles combined with wall units, and upholstered furniture. The points of distinction and deviation are to be found primarily in his individual manner of resolving the relative monotony imposed by rigid technologies and constructivist stylistic constraints: in the expressive presentation of those factors that ensure the atmospheric quality and visual pleasantness of furniture, in the exploitation of aesthetic effects inherent in details, and in the varied articulation of front surfaces. (“I am convinced that it is always possible to alter one defining element of a piece of furniture in such a way that the whole takes on a completely different character. The frame remains the same, but the solution of the doors and many other small details lend it a new appearance,” as Tibor Tóth remarks in one of his statements.) The dominant feature of his furniture constructions is functionality, articulated within a clear, transparent structural framework and always oriented towards meeting communal, everyday needs. The source of variety lies in his innovative approach to the available possibilities and means, in the careful weighing of proportions, symmetries and distributions, and in a considered handling of materials, colours and decorative elements that does not shy away from unconventional solutions. Among his convention-breaking innovations one should mention, for example, the replacement of dark walnut and exotic veneers with lighter veneer finishes, the use of matt paints instead of obligatory glossy lacquers, opalescent, marble-like surfaces, distinctive salmon-pink pigmentations that create a particular atmosphere, and vivid, cheerful colour schemes.
He examined the individual furniture types, beginning with the wall units, also referred to as wall systems, of which several dozen can be found in the oeuvre. The output is impressively rich, replete with one appealing piece after another, so our selection – we readily admit – was made on a subjective basis: we highlighted those solutions that we ourselves found particularly sympathetic. One such example is the wall unit entitled Dallam (Melody), designed in 1977, more precisely its third and most complete version, which – being equipped with a corner element – is also suitable for spatial organisation. The simple, smooth, architectonic wall system, devoid of all superfluous ornamentation, has as its sole decorative feature the beige, linear-striped so-called frieze veneer, which, through the reddish-brown back panels of the negative elements and the frame structure enclosing the units, creates a plastic, relief-like effect. In modular furniture production, incidentally – as also emerges from one of Tibor Tóth’s interviews – one of the greatest problems was precisely the colour variation of veneer sheets, a circumstance of which, according to our master, “outsiders, including journalists who championed modular furniture but were unfamiliar with the practicalities of production, generally took no notice. Since every element had to be colour-identical, only a single composition could be produced from one veneer batch, and even within that batch selection had to ensure that the grain patterns were in balance with one another. A further difficulty was that the veneer discoloured over time, within a year or a year and a half in the home, which called into question the possibility of extending the given wall system with additional elements. The dimensions and formats matched, but the colour did not. In order to ensure interchangeability, it became necessary for production to switch to so-called laminated furniture boards; consequently, both FALCO, the supplier of furniture boards, and the factories themselves were compelled to acquire equipment capable of laminating film papers reflecting the material characteristics of different wood species onto the boards, thus ensuring uniformity in both colour and grain pattern. This investment once again required millions, and was only realised towards the end of the 1970s; until then, the time-consuming and precision-demanding manual work remained unavoidable, the cost of which, naturally, was also reflected in the price of the furniture.” As for Dallam, the above-mentioned version of the wall unit was presented to the public at the 1978 Otthon Exhibition, where it was felicitously paired with the likewise cubistic Tandem (Tandem) modular upholstered seating suite, originally a 1976 Tóth design. Although the public appreciated the pairing, the retail sector considered the wall unit too expensive, and for this reason the factory ultimately abandoned plans for series production.
The fate of the wall unit designed a year later, the Dalida wall system (Dalida), presented in 1979, developed more favourably: 2,488 units were sold. This, too, is a constructivist piece, stylistically evoking the puritan spirit of Scandinavian material culture. Its restrained yet effective decorative elements consist of slightly undulating mouldings, darker in tone than the light brown base veneer, applied to the positive, that is closed, elements of the wall unit; these form a distinctive contrast with the dynamically rippling extension fitted to the lower edge of the upper wardrobe row. The tension generated by this contrast, further accentuated by the witty placement of the turned handles, introduces a subtle folk-regional flavour into the overall composition. The folk influence becomes more pronounced in the Marietta wall unit (Marietta), designed in 1988, where the white furniture panels are overlaid, both horizontally and vertically, by a grid of brown slats – which also function as handles – recalling the geometrising motifs of traditional woven textiles. The composition is a noteworthy example of a certain transplantation of folk heritage into a modern urban environment. The Capoló wall unit (Capoló), characterised by large black surfaces and metal-effect plastic appliqués, derives its particular interest from its decorative, jewellery-like handle system, which lends the ensemble a kind of Oriental inflection. Commercial considerations motivated several rusticising wall-unit compositions of the early 1980s, marketed under the names Garbó (Garbó) and Hamburg (Hamburg). This hybrid, transitional furniture type, positioned between period-style and modern furniture, lay far from our master’s own design sensibility; its character and formal language were defined not by stylistic motifs but by mouldings, frames and panels – that is, by external appliqués. A segment of the public nevertheless favoured and actively sought this commercial, eclectic furniture type, which for many conveyed an appearance of refinement and prestige, making it impossible to ignore for reasons of factory interest alone. Tibor Tóth himself acknowledged that, given the lagging state of domestic public taste, innovations could only be introduced in small steps, since the market does not tolerate abrupt departures from the average. Although his rustic wall units are not free from the problematic compromises inherent in such transitional solutions, his experiments deserve credit in that he shifts the employed formal vocabulary alternately towards classical styles or towards modernity, thereby managing to avoid jarring anonymity. The display cabinet version of Hamburg, with its playfully contoured frame structures and fluted veneer infills, represents an interesting attempt to reinterpret certain elements of the dynamically articulated neo-Rococo and Biedermeier from a contemporary perspective, just as the more rigidly linear Garbó, adorned with plastic, strongly profiled frames, can be regarded rather as a type-furniture solution than as a colonial-style pastiche.
The Ékes wall unit (Ékes – Wedge) derives its name from its wedge-shaped handles and was presented by our master at the 1992 furniture trade fair. Crafted with refined workmanship, attractive proportions and a well-considered range of fittings, and produced partly using flat-pack technology, the piece is unquestionably one of the most accomplished works of the oeuvre. Its white-lacquered elements are framed by coloured cornices or full plinths in green or blue; this colour reappears on the front of the drawer unit, on the edge mouldings of the two-door display cabinet inserted between the shelving units, on the cover panels of the lower wardrobe row supporting the open units, and even on the cut-glass shelves and the handles themselves. The white lacquer finish of the doors and open interiors visually reduces the perceived scale of the unit, lending the ensemble the character of a veritable jewellery box, whose aesthetic impact is completed by the objects placed on the shelves by the user and by the pictures hung in the interstices between them. A delicate idea is the system of engraved–etched lines incised into the door panels, centrally echoing the wedge shape of the handles, while an innovative, form-shaping concept underlies the animation of the wall unit’s frontal plane: certain elements of the wardrobe row are positioned alternately in front of or behind the main plane, thus intoning a subtle spatial rhythm.
Another group within the oeuvre is formed by furniture ensembles tailored to different life functions – in other words, room furnishings or fully furnished rooms. The majority are living rooms, among them arrangements that can also serve as bedrooms or studies, as well as triple-function ensembles combining living, sleeping and working areas; examples include youth living rooms designed with age-specific needs in mind. We also know of bedrooms designed by Tibor Tóth, furniture sets created specifically for children, and a brief period during which his interest turned towards the particular challenges of office furniture and hotel room design. It hardly needs saying that even as an interior designer Tibor Tóth thinks in terms of serial furniture; he was one of the Hungarian initiators and pioneers of a design approach that conceives furniture from the outset in relation to living space, that is, with close attention to the concrete environment into which it will eventually be placed. In the 1970s and 1980s this environment was predominantly the prefabricated apartment living room, whose relatively small floor area and undifferentiated spatial structure could only be rendered multifunctional through furnishing. Complete furniture arrangements designed in various configurations and presented at trade fairs and department stores thus fulfilled an important role: they served as models for buyers with vague ideas and little confidence. Industrial policy-makers also recognised this, and in cooperation with professional organisations announced competitions every one or two years with the aim of expanding or refreshing the range; in the absence of independent market research, marketing strategies or more far-reaching intentions of change, these initiatives often provided the initial impetus for factories to embark on production and product development.
Living room furnishings could be realised in two ways: either an already completed wall unit was paired with an equally finished furniture suite matching its character, or the entire ensemble was composed within a single, coherent stylistic concept. Both approaches are represented in Tibor Tóth’s portfolio. In the first case, if nothing else, the coffee table had to correspond to the character of the wall unit; in the second, every element of the furnishing was aligned with the stylistically defining wall unit. Such compositions, compact both formally and atmospherically, were given a distinct brand name, whereas in the former solution the wall unit and the seating furniture appeared under different names. Tibor Tóth’s design practice clearly favoured compositions conceived in a unified style, based on – or at least tending towards – the principle of furniture families; over the years he became a veritable specialist of this particular genre, whose lessons later proved equally valuable in his interior design work.
The living-room cycle opens with two significant works, the Capri and Szivárvány living rooms designed in 1970. Both are dual-function constructions, capable of serving as both living rooms and bedrooms, and although they fulfil these tasks in the simplest and most economical manner, they are nevertheless attractive, even striking, in appearance. This is especially true of the Capri, whose wall unit was clad by the designer, in defiance of the prevailing fashion for dark veneers, in a pale, almost white maple veneer; this colour was then carried through, in a sign-like manner, across all the furniture pieces of the ensemble, as a symbol of their belonging together. The true unifying force – the stylistic identity of the collection – lies in the geometric nature of the formal language, which, although not entirely unfamiliar, was unusual in its consistency at the time. Both the armchairs and the daybeds are so-called frame-based pieces, their angular construction echoing the architectural character of the wall unit. That the overall composition does not become monotonous is due to the sensually charged burgundy-red upholstery fabrics of the seating and sleeping furniture, even if their effect is somewhat diminished by the seemingly superfluous white artificial-leather buttoning. The ensemble, supplemented by a television armchair with headrest, was entered by the factory in the 1971 Otthon exhibition, where it was purchased by the celebrated leading actor of the period, Lajos Básti.
According to Tibor Tóth’s recollection, the Szivárvány (Rainbow) was the first piece of furniture in Hungary to be finished with a matt lacquer; the subdued surface effect was achieved by applying a colourless nitrocellulose lacquer over a light ash veneer. The overall appearance of the living room is less showy than that of the Capri (Capri), yet it is more thoroughly resolved in functional terms. Its daybeds were already equipped with built-in bedding storage, and its angular coffee table was also designed to serve as a storage unit. The upholstery of the beds and armchairs, likewise tending towards burgundy red, is more restrained in tone to match the matt-lacquered frames, and, owing to its ribbed patterning, also conveys a rougher, more material-like tactile quality. One of the ensemble’s greatest advantages is its modest space requirement, achieved through the carefully coordinated and harmonised sizing of the individual furniture units.
The success of custom-designed living rooms assembled from standardised elements prompted the factory, in order to avoid uniformity, to commission our master to develop a programme based on the product-family principle, aimed at the serial production of furniture and furniture ensembles of differing purposes, built on type variants of basic models. This became the so-called T Programme, within the framework of which, through certain modifications or further developments of structure, format or appearance, products of similar character and construction yet endowed with new identities and functions were created from the same model, while the production technology itself remained essentially unchanged. Thus a living space could function both as a living room and as a bedroom or study; a seating unit could be transformed into a bed, and a bed into seating; a closed wall unit could be reconfigured as a piece of furniture also serving as a space divider. All variants developed within the programme were given brand names beginning with the letter T: among others, between 1972 and 1974 the Tavasz (Spring) youth living room, the Tekla (Tekla) and Titusz (Titus) living rooms, and the Tátika (Tátika) bedroom were created, followed by a further T-series living room cycle comprising Tünde (Tünde), Tímea (Tímea) and Tamás (Tamás). The novelty of Tavasz lies in the double bed integrated into the four-metre-long wall unit, which also functions as seating, as well as in the small built-in desk designed to save space. The white-framed wall unit is articulated by doors pigmented in orange-red; the tabletop of the fully-shelved coffee table placed in front of the desk and the daybeds is likewise brightly coloured. The ensemble is completed by an upholstered chair and a more comfortable armchair, their upholstery matching the colour of the daybeds. The complete furnishing was intended primarily for young couples, though it is equally suitable for secondary-school pupils and university students. Its spatial requirements and dimensions correspond closely to those of prefabricated housing living rooms, and, as contemporary commentators noted, its price was also favourable.
The Tekla (Tekla) living room, likewise assembled from elements of the T Programme, was also intended by Tibor Tóth for small apartments. Here the wall unit, which includes a corner element, is already veneered in deference to the taste of middle-aged users, and, keeping pace with the volume of items to be stored, incorporates a greater number of closed units. The armchairs and the coffee table are positioned at the centre of the space, while the striped textile-upholstered daybeds are pushed against the opposite wall and arranged in an L-shape. The socially oriented Titusz (Titus) makes use of the tools of the T Programme only in respect of the modular wall unit and the built-in desk; the associated, generously proportioned seating ensemble – although its cubistic formal language does not differ substantially from that of the wall unit – is already of an individual character. The wall unit is clad in coffee-brown, vertically striped veneer, with the closing doors further accented by delicate inlaid frames. The seating ensemble consists of two armchairs and a three-section sofa convertible into a double bed at night; the beige upholstery, reminiscent of chair caning, resonates with the colour of the inlay. Even if not immediately apparent, this is in fact a combined living–sleeping–working space, once again requiring no more than 24–30 square metres of floor area.
The Bingó (Bingo) youth room designed for early adolescents is a product of the second half of the 1970s, a period when, after prolonged hesitation, the retail sector finally came to terms with flat-pack technology. The bridge-like shelving system wedged between the Bingó wardrobe units was created in this spirit. Elegantly proportioned, finely articulated, and distinguished by a refined colour palette, the wall unit, together with its built-in desk and single daybed that can be used as an armchair during the day, fulfils virtually all the functional requirements of this age group. The light armchairs paired with the wall unit employ a metal-frame construction which, beyond its modernist impulse, also serves a practical purpose: given that these pieces are subject to daily use and are sometimes handled rather roughly by young users, the stabilisation of durability is crucial – something a robust metal frame is better able to ensure than a wooden structure.
The Alfa living room dated 1977, together with the Alfa youth room developed from it, already leads us into a further stage of system-based design thinking, in which the members of a furniture family created through the combination of organised and integrated formal elements – that is, the individual variants of a basic type – themselves become basic types for further variants. Among the innovations of Alfa, first and foremost its material character deserves mention: the ladder-like frame of the wall unit, just like the supporting structure of the seating ensemble, was made of sawn pine timber, while the front planes of the closed elements of the wall unit were also finished with pine veneer. A further novelty is the structural solution of the backless wall unit, in which it is not difficult to recognise a kind of adaptation of the dynamic mass articulation developed in abstract sculpture. As is well known, this methodology exploits the tension arising from the rhythmic interplay of solid and open forms, as well as from the asymmetrical distribution of sculptural units. Tibor Tóth applies the same principle – albeit projected onto a plane – when he works with the rhythmic contrast between the variously shaped box elements suspended from the ladder frame, the positive masses, and the interposed voids of differing formal configurations, the negative masses. Another new development is that the designer rounded off the edges of the box elements set into the white panel frame by inserting a plastic profile, and then repeated this curved motif at certain points of the coffee table and the seating furniture, and even transformed it into a circular form in the plastic handles recessed into the fronts of the cabinet doors and drawers. In contrast to the light-toned Alfa living room, the wall unit of the Alfa youth room developed from it is more compact owing to its multifunctional requirements, an effect further reinforced by the darker veneer of the box elements. Two separate daybeds with bedding storage are inserted into the wall unit, while an additional refinement is that the adjacent elements of the lower wardrobe row can also be used as bedside tables. On this occasion the furnishing is supplemented with a free-standing table and chairs, the upholstery of the latter matching that of the daybeds.
Tibor Tóth’s name is also associated with the first domestically produced Swedish wall–based modular cabinet furniture family, which was presented under the name Viktória (Victoria) at the 1980 Otthon exhibition. The principal benefit of the Swedish wall solution lies in the expansion of the furniture’s flexibility; its major advantage is that certain components are capable, beyond their conventional furniture functions, of fulfilling space-shaping and space-organising roles as well. In Viktória, one of the cabinet rows is placed freely within the interior and opened up, dividing the single-space dwelling into a sleeping and a living zone, while doing so in such a way that several elements of the cabinet row remain fully functional from both sides. Unfortunately, neither the factory nor the retail sector truly recognised the practical merits of this arrangement, and despite the designer’s resistance the system was ultimately removed from the agenda of serial production. The Konvoj (Convoy) modular cabinet furniture family, operating with 110 elements and offering almost unlimited variability, was created on the designer’s drawing board in 1987 and, with sales amounting to an estimated 130 million forints, proved to be one of Tibor Tóth’s most successful furniture families. It is a work of outstanding design and execution, so precisely dimensioned and stabilised that its elements, in smaller formats, can even be placed next to or on top of one another without assembly. From its configurable components one can construct both single- and corner-based double-wing cabinet systems, create an excellently usable study corner, and above all realise the long, low variants rich in sideboard-like formations which – at least in terms of formal logic and spatial demand – already anticipate the stylistic gestures of the minimalist furniture trends that would emerge around the year 2000. It is not known whether light, white or coloured variants were produced; in the versions familiar to us the fronts are covered with teak-imitating laminate, enlivened by a slender profiled dividing strip serving a decorative function, as well as by similarly profiled plastic handles reminiscent of small tabs.
A genuinely avant-garde work is the Michel modular furniture family designed in 1994, which consists of 65 fixed elements based on a completely new, previously unused dimensional system, complemented by 10 container shelves and 9 individual shelves, and was produced in flat-pack form in three front variants. Its carcasses were made of black, grain-embossed furniture boards, while the fronts featured high-gloss mahogany burr, green birch, and redwood-red veneer set within black frames. According to individual requests, blue and orange-veneered fronts with matching shelves were later produced as well, and in some cases the format of the handle sets was also altered. Owing to both its elegant appearance and its refined workmanship, Michel is a distinctive, indeed exclusive piece of furniture – a furniture ensemble whose absence the critics repeatedly lamented. Its principal virtue lies in its extraordinary flexibility: alongside traditional, closed and planar configurations, its elements can also be assembled into expressively charged compositions of special articulation and dimensions, verging on the formal culture of abstract sculpture. If we also take into account the few sofas with striking lines and upholstery that Tibor Tóth designed as complements to the modular cabinet system, it may be stated that Michel is one of those Hungarian furniture designs that come close to the level of Italian designer furniture regarded as ideal at the time.
For Tibor Tóth, upholstered furniture represents a release from constraints, an escape from the shackles of horizontal and vertical parameters. He enjoys this furniture type and practises it with evident pleasure; nearly one third of his oeuvre belongs to this product group. He rightly perceives upholstered furniture primarily as a genre of the body, and several of his compositions amount to ergonomic feats. It is a conscious ambition of his that his armchairs and sofas should meet not only the requirements of comfort but also those of multifunctionality, which explains why many of them are conceived as dual-purpose solutions, suitable both for sitting and for sleeping. In contrast to the constructivist linearity of case furniture, upholstered ensembles are for the most part born of organic form-making; within their emotionally charged formal language, the distinctive rhythm and vitality of biomorphic shapes find expressive articulation.
Beyond his individual inventions, the transformation of nature-responsive ideas and concepts into tangible products was, of course, also shaped by the technological and material revolution that fundamentally reshaped Western European furniture production in the 1960s–1970s, and within it upholstered furniture manufacturing in particular – a field that strongly attracted the attention of Tibor Tóth, who was always receptive to innovation. As he explained in an interview, his very first trip to Milan in 1970 convinced him that the intellectual level of Hungarian furniture design lagged in no way behind that of the Italians: “the source of the delay was poverty – the lack of materials, the lack of fittings, the lack of technology, and everything else that made it impossible to compete either with foreign designers or with foreign manufacturers, because the money was missing.” By that time, Italian producers had already completely renewed the production and manufacturing methods of upholstered furniture: traditional materials such as springs, horsehair and straw were replaced by plastics and soft and rigid polyurethane foams, and in many cases even the supporting structure and the padding were formed in a single operation using moulding techniques. Tibor Tóth, who perceived in the advantages offered by chemical-based materials not only the expected economic benefits but also the potential to invigorate design thinking itself, lobbied persistently for the factory to purchase the licences, materials and equipment required for plastic-based production, to be financed from foreign-currency revenues earned through subcontracted work. His task was far from easy, yet time proved him right: thanks to the undertaken investment and to his own experimentally minded ingenuity in this field as well, the Kanizsa factory soon became one of the most successful centres of upholstered furniture production in Hungary..
As time progressed, the upholstered furniture designed by Tibor Tóth acquired an increasingly modern appearance, making almost tangible the structural and formal innovations induced by new materials and production methods. The generously contoured Júlia upholstered suite, designed in 1974, still evokes the comfortable ensembles of the 1930s; perhaps precisely for this reason – and because its castor-mounted base made it easy to move – it won the favour of the public, with 52,250 units sold. The novelty of the Alfa seating suite of 1977 lay in its demountable construction, its pinewood supporting frames, and in the fact that the elements of the accompanying coffee table were slid into one another through cut-out openings in the components. The modular upholstered furniture Nelli, dated 1979, ranks among the major successes of the Tóth oeuvre, generating revenues of 342 million forints for the Kanizsa factory. Comprising two sofas (one with a corner configuration), a pouffe and a coffee table, every component of the set is movable; the back cushions of the sofas are removable, the seat surfaces can be lifted, allowing the furniture to function both as a bed and as bedding storage. The coffee table and the chest-like base of the pouffe likewise provide storage. The suite, whose slightly elongated proportions recall minimalist furniture constructions, is upholstered in red quilted fabric, while the table, also with a red base, is topped with a white surface. The Anna upholstered furniture family of 1980 was awarded a quality prize at the time, and 1,580 examples were purchased mainly by hotels to furnish communal areas and lobbies. Both the three-section sofas and the armchairs are fully upholstered in leather and artificial leather; the padding is attached to the rear planes of the simple, rectilinear frames using adhesive techniques. The armrests are likewise padded, with the upholstery “wrapped over” the edges of the side panels of the frame. The Kitti suite, created in 1985, is again a modular ensemble, its L-shaped divan consisting of four units that can be pushed together. The light-blue, quilted and softly wrinkled upholstery of its foam-formed back and seat elements is removable and washable in case of soiling. The Ralf suite, designed a year later, is an exciting composition in both form and surface treatment: the elements of its broadly curved padding are layered one upon another. The monotony of the grey upholstery is broken by a red textile stripe running along the left edge of the backrests, intensifying the otherwise already modern appearance of the ensemble. The Viktória, created in the early 1990s, once again represents an avant-garde composition, whose frame system is unusually constructed from a combination of wood and metal for upholstered furniture. The backrest assembled with the cubistic base is formed by a steeply inclined tubular structure, over which the leather-covered padding is pulled using a sailcloth sack; the individual elements of the padding (seat, back and head cushions) are connected by so-called fabric hinges. Through this solution for the elevated backrest, the designer endowed the suite with a distinctive, sculptural character.
We know that furniture is not merely a utilitarian object but also a style-bearing element of interior architecture; it is therefore understandable that education related to furniture also encompasses interior design, that is, furniture designers most often work as interior architects as well. Interior architecture, however, is an artistic field requiring a particular sensibility: as Ákos Koczogh, an outstanding expert of the discipline, observes, “an interior architect is someone who, among all possible spatial formations, feels closest to the world of interiors, together with all those objects that are within arm’s reach. […] That is to say: it is not the genre that determines the work – through the creator – but the human being who creates his or her own genre.” The eminent critic might almost have formulated this definition on the basis of the oeuvre of Tibor Tóth, for, as has already been mentioned, our master presented several dozen model rooms at various exhibitions and trade fairs without interpreting them as interior design projects. He acted instinctively, trusting in the expressive power of his furniture ensembles. After a while, however, it seemed self-evident that by elevating these abilities to the level of conscious intention, he should also engage in practice with meeting the interior-design-related demands of the 1970s and 1980s, which likewise multiplied during this period as a result of economic and intellectual development.
The tasks of the interior architect are only rarely self-determined. In most cases they are defined by the prevailing expectations of society; it is from this direction that the commission or brief arrives, whether of a communal or an individual nature. Ideally, the interior architect is involved already in the design and construction of the building, that is, works in concert with the architect – indeed, it sometimes happens that the architect and the interior architect are one and the same person. More often, however, the interior architect receives a finished architectural framework, whose interior must be shaped and furnished, and thus, owing to existing and unavoidable conditions, finds his or her hands bound in many respects. Further constraints are imposed by the nature and function of the building, its sociological and urban context; one must also take into account the available financial and technological resources, and the wishes of the client cannot be disregarded either. As a general principle it may be stated that, in the case of post hoc commissions, compromises are usually unavoidable, and since the scope for intervention in the architectural formation is already limited, it is rather the applied-artistic, object-creating side of the designer’s talent that comes to the fore. In the interior-design work of Tibor Tóth it is precisely this latter category – furniture design and furnishing tailored to specific spaces – that predominates, which is also related to his conviction that architectural design should proceed from interior function; at the same time, there are also a considerable number of complex projects demanding a high level of expertise in which interior architecture asserts itself in its classical fullness, as a space-shaping and interior-forming discipline.
Tibor Tóth received his first interior-design commissions from his hometown, which held his factory work in high esteem: he was asked to remodel and give a new visual identity to the city’s public offices, including the offices of the council president, the chief prosecutor and party officials. Later, the requests grew in scope, first at county level, then across Transdanubia, and eventually nationwide, expanding to include the demands of companies, trusts and ministerial institutions. “I always began the work by studying the locations themselves, by familiarising myself with the activities carried out there and with the people working in those spaces. In roughly eighty per cent of the places I visited, I encountered anti-functional interiors, marked by inconsistent taste and a jumble of mismatched furniture, usually assembled by procurement officers on the basis of their superiors’ idiosyncratic instructions. I am not exaggerating when I say that, in terms of furniture, almost the entire commercial palette was represented. Of course, I also found good-quality, valuable pieces, including bespoke ensembles purchased from Képcsarnok shops, but even the most comfortable and attractive furniture could be undermined by an ill-chosen carpet, curtains clashing in colour, and so on. […] Having surveyed and thought through the situation, I developed a new concept and made a proposal for the changes I envisaged, to which the response was usually: yes, yes, but we see it differently. It emerged that everyone wanted, in one way or another, to surround themselves with an environment reminiscent of the one in which they had grown up, of what they were accustomed to. And this is where my real work began: I had to find that point of convergence which justified my own approach but which the client’s mentality could also accept. So if I had to define the character of my administrative and corporate interiors, I would say that I created environments that were modern in outlook yet devoid of ostentation, that served the required functions well and were comfortable, while at the same time evoking a sense of homeliness – that is, indirectly and by subtle means, they also referred back to the milieu from which the client originated. It was in this spirit that my first office interior was completed in 1970: the five-room official residence of the president of the Nagykanizsa City Council, followed over the years by a long series of similar commissions. With regard to suites of related rooms (executive office, secretariat, small and large meeting rooms, and so on), I strove for stylistic unity, but I also sought to give each space an individual profile: for example, in contrast to the serious atmosphere of executive offices, I gave the secretariat a light, even colourful appearance, and sometimes opted for bold, distinctive forms for the tables and chairs in meeting rooms. Everywhere I designed bespoke furniture suited to the environment and the task at hand, produced by the factory’s model-making department; however, since budgets were tight, in the interest of economical execution I occasionally also took the possibilities of serial production into account,” our master recalls.
Following the successful modernisation of party offices in Somogy, Zala and Vas counties, Tibor Tóth became a sought-after figure on the interior-design market, and in this capacity he was admitted to the select group of artists commissioned to develop and furnish the Balaton holiday resorts of the highest party and state authorities. Unlike the office programmes, where there was little room for manoeuvre in architectural terms, here the field was considerably more open: in several cases, architects designed entire buildings in accordance with our master’s interior concepts. In one form or another, Tibor Tóth left his mark on virtually all of the party holiday complexes. In Balatonaliga he designed an restaurant, an espresso bar, a club and a cinema, as well as nineteen representative apartments; in Balatonföldvár a holiday hotel with 290 rooms; and in Arács and Öszöd villas of varying size – more precisely, he was responsible for the comprehensive interior design of all these spaces and buildings. Among other works, his name is associated with the interior design of the 120-square-metre Kádár villa in Aliga, built in 1974, which, according to the brief, “had to be all-encompassing, comfortable, yet restrained.” Our master met this challenge by dispensing with ornamentation, employing noble materials, and using light colours that evoked the Mediterranean tonality of the Pannonian landscape. Unfortunately, neither this work nor Tibor Tóth’s other Balaton projects conceived in a similar spirit can be verified today: in recent years, partly due to privatisation and partly for other reasons, the former party resorts have undergone so many changes that they have completely lost their original character. Occasionally, a few contemporary photographs surface, but even these cannot be regarded as fully reliable, since for security reasons photography was not permitted on the sites at the time.
In 1973, the Kanizsa Furniture Factory – and personally its designer, Tibor Tóth – received a significant distinction: alongside several Finnish companies, they were invited to take part in a competition announced by the Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the CPSU for the furnishing of a newly built dormitory. According to the call, participants were required, adapting to the provided floor plans, to develop type designs for a multifunctional work–study–living room, and moreover to present full-scale prototypes. The instructions were terse, but it was clear that the aim was to procure solid, durable furniture – the organisers evidently took into account the rather unrestrained lifestyle of the academy’s residents. Our master travelled to Moscow several times to discuss the details, and the generous hospitality he experienced there convinced him that the requirements outlined in the brief were grounded in reality. He therefore designed simple, practical, robust oak furniture, which the Kanizsa factory’s model workshop promptly produced. The stress-testing of the completed prototypes took place in Moscow, and, as Tibor Tóth later admitted, exceeded all expectations. “The tables were tested by jumping onto them – even dancing on their tops – while people threw themselves onto the beds from a distance, as if drunk. The effect was phenomenal: the Finns’ finely contoured, curved tables collapsed with creaking and cracking noises, whereas my angular oak constructions withstood the trial. In short, my designs were accepted, and the right to realise them was, as far as I know, granted to a large provincial furniture combine.” In 1992, our master fulfilled another Soviet commission: this time he was invited to design the complete interior of a 360-room spa hotel to be built in Borjomi, Georgia, including, naturally, all of the hotel’s communal and service spaces as well.
Among the larger-scale projects realised in Hungary, first place must be given to the 1992 listed-building reconstruction of the Primate’s Palace in Buda Castle. The reconstruction was made urgent by the papal visit, as according to the plans the Holy Father was to be accommodated there. At the time, the palace was in mixed ecclesiastical and state ownership, with the ground floor occupied by an academic research institute. As the building was a protected monument, the objective was to restore its original condition, a task undertaken by our master together with Judit Czéh. Virtually everything had to be replaced – flooring, wall coverings, chandeliers – which required extensive research and, naturally, the redesign of missing elements. The greatest challenge proved to be the furnishing of the large reception and conference rooms; this was ultimately resolved by restoring an early Baroque furniture set discovered in the attic of the Primate’s Palace in Esztergom. The plush velvet fabric imported from Vienna was applied to the chairs and sofas by the specialists of the Béke Upholstery Cooperative. All other rooms were furnished with delicately stylised Biedermeier-style furniture, much of which was again sourced in Esztergom. The mensa altar of the ground-floor chapel was designed by Pál Tóth, while the paintings, the corpus and the pews were loaned by ecclesiastical institutions.
Tibor Tóth was also responsible for the interior architectural design of the 3,000-square-metre ABC supermarket within the Mediterrán Automotive Shopping Centre built in Balatonfüred in 1993, and in 1994 he likewise designed the interior of the wine bar and restaurant known as Sárga hordó for the North Pest Catering Company. Still in operation today, next to the Boating Lake in Nagykanizsa, is the Korona Inn of the local brewery, whose folk-inspired bespoke furniture was likewise designed by Tóth.
Of what was perhaps our master’s most ambitious project – the complete exterior and interior transformation and furnishing of the Papírker Plc headquarters on Alkotmány Street – we can now form an impression only on the basis of photographic documentation, as the 1,700-square-metre office complex, completed in 1997 after two years of intensive work, was sold a few years later and subsequently partly demolished and remodelled by its new owner. The Papírker headquarters originally belonged to Budapest’s so-called Palatinus Houses, and both its interior and exterior reflected the spectacular object culture of the turn of the century. It had earlier been owned by a paper merchant, who established storage spaces in the basement, a shopfront on the ground floor, and his residence on the first floor, while the upper floors were occupied by tenants. The company decided to undertake the modernisation of the severely dilapidated building around 1990, allocating close to 40 million forints for the costs. Tóth embarked on the renovation and transformation – which, incidentally, took place alongside ongoing office operations within the building – together with the architect László Petrovics. As a first step, they transformed the many small rooms into open-plan spaces, reconsidered the spatial divisions, and restored the marble staircases and wrought-iron railings. In defining the building’s character, they took as their point of departure the Art Deco profile motifs of the façade and the distinctive features of its magnificent bronze entrance gate studded with rivets. In this spirit, they designed a new business portal and a series of display windows, whose aluminium frames were clad, both externally and internally, with wood stained bronze in colour; moreover, to the astonishment of the heritage authorities, the riveted detailing was also reproduced in wood on the street-facing timber cladding. The warehouse once again remained in the basement; the column-articulated open-plan ground floor housed the commercial division, while the upper level accommodated accounting, finance, and executive offices. Inside, all original doors were replaced with new glazed doors echoing the motifs of the entrances, and, in order to soften the spatial impact, the columns of the large rooms were clad in timber panelling combined with mirrors. The executive offices were furnished with Italian furniture, while the administrative spaces were equipped with the modular office furniture of Garzon from Székesfehérvár. The ingenious company sign, shaped like a paper ribbon curling at both ends, was executed in metal by the goldsmith artist László Kodolányi; this was the only element of the Art Deco business portal that could be described as overtly modern. With the demolition and alteration of the building, it would seem that not only one of the most brilliant architectural–interior architectural achievements of recent decades disappeared, but that the capital itself was impoverished by the loss of an exemplary, faithfully restored yet contemporarily functional building.
As mentioned earlier, Tibor Tóth parted ways with the Kanizsa factory in 1995, following its privatisation, and for several years worked as artistic director of Domus Land Plc. In 1997, together with several partners, he founded a company under the name T and T Design Ltd; today he serves as the managing director of this small enterprise, while since 2003 he has also been teaching furniture industrial design as a private lecturer at the Institute of Applied Arts of the University of West Hungary. Pedagogy has always been a field of particular interest to him, as has scholarly research related to art education and design; it is therefore no coincidence that he is a member of more than a dozen professional associations and creative communities, and that he also serves as an expert in copyright matters for the Hungarian Patent Office.
As he complained a few years ago in an interview given to Péter Lelkes, at the time he left college with fragmentary knowledge: he had received high-quality artistic training, yet knew virtually nothing about the everyday realities of furniture production, about factories and manufacturers, or about the possibilities and limitations of the Hungarian furniture industry. Consequently, upon entering professional life he was compelled to continue his education, acquiring precisely that body of knowledge which the college had failed to provide. Now that he himself has become an educator and teacher, he follows an educational system built on experience: he does not sever his students from the real world, but on the contrary consciously directs them, already during their studies, towards furniture-manufacturing workshops. He sees a major advantage in teaching at a university concerned with wood and the issues of the wood industry, since this enables him to integrate into furniture industrial design and into actual products the intellectual knowledge the university provides in the fields of production, technology, structural engineering and materials science. As he works with third- and fourth-year students who have already completed their basic training, he does not need to labour over introducing furniture-manufacturing technologies. The half-dozen students who come under his supervision already know all there is to know about these matters, allowing all energies to be devoted to grasping and understanding design methodologies. His aim is not to train designers of art objects or applied artists, but design artists – designers who have every trick of the trade at their fingertips and who move with equal confidence in factories and in private studios.
He knows that a good designer must always stay ahead of existing needs, yet he also maintains that the designer’s vision and the audience’s capacity for reception must not drift too far apart; one must always find the point at which these two factors meet. Anyone who wishes to have an impact – and a designer can have no other aim – must not lose touch with reality, but must remain grounded in sober sovereignty. He does not share the view that the essence of the design profession lies in the incessant pursuit of novelty, yet he equally rejects the notion that a designer’s sole purpose should be to conceive products that are immediately marketable. In his view, both positions represent extremes; the middle path lies in conscientious, thorough work, in precise knowledge of needs, and in the careful weighing of alternatives. Design is a cultural activity, and even if production has not yet risen to this level, the designer must nevertheless presume the existence of a culture of production, because design – according to our master – can only become a driving force, a shaper of a positive vision of the future, within this very framework.
That he is a successful teacher is most clearly evidenced by the achievements of his students, whose diploma projects are eagerly sought after by factories, and who win competition prizes even in the presence of well-established peers. He does not, of course, remain silent about painful issues either: the school’s bureaucratic inertia and its financial vulnerability. He also takes issue with the profession’s lack of solidarity and is troubled by the neglect of collectively agreed goals. As a cultural policy actor and organiser, he seeks to remedy such anomalies, and is present at every initiative aimed at strengthening the recognition and prestige of the furniture profession. The long-standing interior design gathering at Zsennye would have all but disappeared for lack of funding had he not personally secured financial support from the ministry, the National Cultural Fund (NKA), and more affluent private companies. Networking is his element: his notebook contains the name of everyone from whom he expects, or will one day expect, something. It is for this reason that he is able to champion his students, recommend them, and, when possible, actively promote their work. It is hardly accidental that manufacturers regularly attend the diploma exhibitions of graduating students, knowing full well that among Tibor Tóth’s protégés there is much worth discovering.
Yes, Tibor Tóth is not only adept at product design, but also at what might be called the design of people – a quality that, in our frivolous and indifferent age, is truly worthy of appreciation and emulation.