Furniture-making in Poznań 1945-1989. Education, design, production

Principal investigator: Prof. Piotr Korduba

Research grant NCN PRELUDIUM BIS

The aim of this project is to reconstruct the picture of the Poznań furniture-making in 1945-1989, taking into account the reciprocal relationships of entities within the framework. After World War II, Poznań became a place where one found the main regulatory bodies responsible for the development of the furniture industry, along with its educational base and exhibition facilities.

This unique concurrence of determining factors made Poznań the foremost centre of furniture-making with a nationwide impact. Furniture-making in Poznań functioned in the conditions of centrally planned production, regionalized art education, and the context of assets offered by the main domestic institution dedicated to industrial exhibitions: the Poznań International

Fair. The research problem formulated in the title, will be approached from the standpoint of dynamic relations between institutions, the tensions generated by the interests their pursued, and the individual creative attitudes. Hitherto, researchers seem to have been unaware the fact that furniture-making in Poznań functioned in a complex network of interdependencies, which is why numerous key materials have not been used in studies, thus yielding a picture which remains incomplete.

The studies will be divided given research objectives. Consequently, one will explore the archives of key institutions, study the work of designers, reconstruct how furniture-making factories functioned, analyze items of furniture. Context for these studies will be provided by domestic norms applicable to furniture-making, normative guidelines for mass housing construction and mechanisms of consumption of goods. The time-frame of the investigations will be informed by major political events which had a direct impact on the industry and affected the dynamics of the title issue.

This project is within the current of research focusing on the history of design, construed in the light of the Production-Consumption-Mediation Paradigm (PCM) (Lees-Maffei). Although the artefact remains in the scope of inquiry, the key issue to be explored is mediation, i.e. practices, narratives, and mechanisms which engender its cultural and social meanings. Spanning the essential phenomena, such as consumption with its transmission channels, mediation between the producer and the consumer, as well as the active role of produced goods, the PCM will be aligned with the functioning of furniture design in the circumstances of state patronage, centrally controlled production and rationed consumption. The phenomenon of mediation is also observed with respect to the relationally linked institutions that make up the environment in which the furniture-making developed and were socially distributed. Also, these studies are in line with the inquiry into design in the former Eastern Bloc, where design used to be perceived as an element of implementing social revolution and creating a living space for the “new human” (Crowley;Dörhöfer; Buchli; Zarecor; Harris). Apart from approaching design as a social engineering strategy, the project adopts perspective inwhich design itself is considered in conjunction with standards of mass housing construction, applicable material rationing, and supervisory control of the design processes.

The research into the Poznań furniture-making environment will constitute a substantial contribution to the studies on the Polish design in the latter half of the 20th century, which has recently attracted increased scientific interest. Simultaneously, the project will add to the historical-artistic investigations concerned with the history of interiors, residential architecture as well as relations of politics, power, propaganda and material culture in the strategies of society-building, by exploring how the framework functioned in the communist states.