Art: Furniture in Capsules

In a brand-new portable house in Portsmouth, Va.—it was one of a colony of 5,000 built for workers at nearby Norfolk Navy Yard—workmen unpacked four packing boxes, removed 138 odd-shaped pieces of laminated plywood. Then they went to work with screwdrivers. In a little over 15 minutes they had assembled: three beds, five chairs, 17 clothes compartments, two bookcases, four tables, a desk, odd stools, cabinets, utility bins, etc. The four-room house was furnished and ready to be lived in. For the first time a portable house had been completely equipped with demountable furniture. Cost: under $500.

This plywood equipment was easy on the eye as well as the rump and elbow. It was one designer’s offering of just what the furniture industry needed: cheapness, mass production, portability, adaptability to clean, gimcrackless modern architecture.

The designer was a plain-monickered Manhattan interior decorator named Dan Cooper. Affable, barrel-chested Designer Cooper spent years buying and selling Tudor chairs and Louis XIV sofas. Then he decided that what the restless U.S. needed, to beat the high cost of moving vans, was capsule furniture. His credo: “What the heck do we need in the way of furniture? We need a place to sit, to sleep, to put our personal possessions into or on top of, to eat, to write and play games.” Trade-named Pakto, the Cooper capsules are manufactured by North Carolina’s Drexel Furniture Co.

Other U.S. furniture designers likewise pondered how to streamline the apparatus of the U.S. home, rock the foundation of the furniture trade. Two designers stood out. Each has designed modern furniture that combines common sense with a reasonable amount of beauty and a reasonable amount of comfort.

> Dark-haired, C. (Calvert) Coggeshall claims his Plyline Knock-Down chairs are as comfortable as anything Grandfather lounged in. He has emphasized one branch of functionalism a lot of modern furniture designers forget about: the buyer’s pocketbook. More stylish than Cooper’s furniture, Designer Coggeshall’s is built with handsome but inexpensive fir or birch. Like Cooper’s, his chairs and tables easily demount to fit into neat packages. A Coggeshall dining table costs $12.50; coffee table, $3.50; chair, from $2.50 to $5. Coggeshall’s proudest achievement: a $3.50 table, cut from a single piece of plywood. It stands without benefit of nails or glue. Coggeshall thinks his knock-down furniture would be fine for barracks overseas.

> Lanky, gable-nosed, Terence Harold Robsjohn-Gibbings, proprietor of an elegant Madison Avenue furniture studio, is the author of a peg-legged, web-seated chair, which some fellow experts consider the finest of its kind. Robsjohn-Gibbings (pronounced the way it is spelled) has spent years fashioning tricky, glass-topped tables and elegant gadgets for the Park Avenue trade. Now he wants to design furniture for the workingman. A learned, articulate, 38-year-old U.S. citizen who settled in Manhattan in 1936, Robsjohn-Gibbings has made a careful study of furniture from Ancient Egypt to the present. “The Greeks,” he was amazed to learn, “made a good chair design and used it for 500 years. They said, ‘Now we have a good chair; let’s get on to other things. Let’s study philosophy.’ The world has not made a more beautiful chair since then.” The trouble with contemporary furniture, he declares, is too much variety of design. Says he: “Furniture should be standardized the way cars, refrigerators or telephones are standardized. You don’t worry whether you have a Louis XVI kitchen or not.”

The three designers turn out furniture that looks very different, but they are furiously united on one point: their detestation of the reproductions and pseudo-antiques now being turned out by the big furniture manufacturers and bought by the public. Says Robsjohn-Gibbings:

“It is tragic to see a vast movement like contemporary architecture gaining in strength and beauty, and becoming an absolute part of our lives, while the entire commercial furniture industry, which should have been a part of this development, has completely failed to grasp the significance of it. Standardization of design has already given you the most beautiful bathrooms and kitchens the world has ever seen. It has given you the best automobiles, the best planes and . . . the best-dressed women in the world. And now standardization is going to do the same thing for your entire house, and make your life a better one to live.”