Desk of Douglas fir plywood with solid wood parts, Rudolph Schindler, California, ca.1946

Desk made from sheets of Douglas Fir plywood joined by nails, with solid pine elements. It is of a cantilever design, and the right side is extended. There is a a unit of three drawers located off-centre; the bottom is deeper for files, the top two are more narrow. The drawers have no handle fixtures, and the fronts extend beyond the sides to provide grip. The bottom drawer was formerly lockable, and there is a keyhole on the right side.

Above the desktop there is a superstructure containing six pigeon holes on the front of the desk, with a blank facing to its left. It has a flat, overhanging top, similar to the desktop, the friezes being made from thick, planed sheets of solid pine nailed to the edges of the plywood top. The lower proper left-end has a raised platform continuing the line from the bottom of the lowest drawer. On the back are five bookshelves; two behind the footwell, three behind the raised platform.

The object has an all-over greenish hue - the result of having been clear stained greenish white - it is is particularly noticeable inside the bookshelves, pigeon holes and footwell.

Many of the nails used in its construction are rusted, and several project from the surface of the object.

Given by Lionel March in memory of his wife Maureen Mary Vidler

This desk was given to the V&A by the distinguished architect, mathematician and digital artist Professor Lionel March. Two other pieces from the same suite, a coffee table and a dining chair (W.14-2014 and W.15-2014 respectively), were also acquired. The remainder of the suite, comprising a dining table, dressing table, three chests of drawers and four chairs, was acquired by the Museum of Applied Arts (Museum für angewandte Kunst) in Vienna, the city of Schindler's birth.

The suite was commissioned in about 1946 by Rudolph Schindler's friend, Beata Inaya (1903 or 1910-1991), a Bello-Russian Jewish émigré resident in Los Angeles, who worked as a travel agent, and for whom Schindler also designed two unbuilt houses. Inaya was an enthusiastic proponent of modernist architecture. In addition to helping Schindler find building sites, she later in life provided scholarships for architectural students, organized art and architectural exhibitions, campaigned to save Watts Towers and was active in the Women’s Architectural League of Los Angeles. The furniture formed part of the furnishings for a poorly documented flat that Schindler created for Inaya (drawings of the chairs survive at the University of California Santa Barbara, and one is published in Marla C. Berns, The Furniture of R.M. Schindler).

The pieces are made of Douglas fir plywood (the most common type in the United States, originating in the Pacific northwest) which Schindler scrubbed with a wire brush to bring out the grain. The plywood would have been covered with a clear finish, possibly with a bit of whitewash or limewash or white lead paint brushed into the wood first, allowing its grain and texture to become especially prominent. Schindler designed his furniture, like his buildings, with utmost economy of materials and methods of construction. His interest in plywood was long-standing and he almost never designed moulded plywood furniture, like many of his contemporaries, but instead stuck to less expensive cut-out plywood. Most of his furniture was nailed and glued together and the designs were said to try to make use of as much of each large plywood board as possible. Professor March recalled clients of Schindler suggesting to a dinner guest that they should 'bring your hammer with you': a jovial reference to the simplicity of construction seen in his furniture.

The furniture was at some point painted pink (her favourite colour) by Beata Inaya. She lent pieces to an exhibition in Madrid in 1984 (R.M. Schindler Arquitecto, Sala de Exposiciones del MOPU [Ministerio de Obras Publicas y Urbanismo]). When she lent the furniture to Professor March for the Schindlerfest at UCLA (1987-8, marking the centenary of Schindler’s birth), Inaya requested that it be restored to its previous condition. Under Professor March’s supervision, and with the collaboration of Schindler expert Professor David Gebhard of UC Santa Barbara, UCLA graduate architecture students stripped the furniture of its pink paint and restored it to what was considered close to its original condition. Gebhard drew on the documents held in his university’s Schindler Archive as well as on his own long experience of working with Schindler furniture, in determining the necessary treatment.

Sometime after the furniture’s return to Mrs Inaya in 1988 her apartment was flooded while she was abroad. The furniture was taken to March’s garage (at Schindler’s How House in Silver Lake) to dry out and then returned to Mrs Inaya. Upon her death, the furniture was bequeathed to Professor March and his wife Maureen Mary Vidler. The March-Vidlers lent pieces to the Univeristy Art Museum, UCSB in 1996-97.

In 2003 Professor March retired from UCLA and moved to Ely, where he built an extension to house the Schindler furniture.

Rudolf Schindler was born in Vienna and studied there with the eminent architect Otto Wagner. He emigrated to the United States in 1914 in the hope of working for Frank Lloyd Wright, an ambition he achieved in 1918. His first jobs for Wright included working on the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo (based in Los Angeles) and then supervising construction of the Hollyhock House. Schindler remained in Los Angeles the rest of his life, building a series of important houses, including his own house and studio (1921-22, now open to the public). When Wright had work (which was not so often during the 1920s), Schindler continued to work for him while also building his own designs. The two parted acrimoniously in 1931 and Schindler began his own independent practice.

Schindler’s furniture designs were always emphatically geometric and architectural. Simple shapes—rectangles, squares, semi-circles—were the basis of his designs. Each element in his architectural design has a spatial function within the interior: to create or, in Schindler’s words, to define or mould space. In this regard his furniture appeared especially architectural. Many of his pieces were clearly influenced by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright; indeed, the desk looks like a model of a Wright building. However, Schindler established his own vocabulary of form and construction independent of Wright.

The low height of the desktop reflects Schindler's attention to Beata Inaya's slight frame.

This desk formed part of a suite of furniture designed in about 1946 by Austrian-born architect Rudolph Schindler. It was commissioned by his friend, Beata Inaya, for her flat in Los Angeles, California; the low height of its desktop reflecting the small frame of the client. Its structural simplicity and geometric form are typical of Schindler's designs, while also being reminiscent of the building design of his former employer, Frank Lloyd Wright. The desk is cantilevered and is stabilised by the heavy central unit containing file drawers and bookshelves. It utilises Douglas Fir plywood for its construction, a cheap type of plywood that was commonly used for concrete shuttering.

W.13-2014