S333 sledge, tubular stainless steel and woven textile, designed by Holger Lange for Thonet, Germany, 2006

Lightweight sledge with tubular stainless steel frame. The frame is a single continuous form, with the front raised to the approximate level of the cantileved seat. The seat itself appears to move forwards over the runners towards the front of the sledge. There is a black woven fabric strap attached to the front, and a seat of the same material at the back.

Purchased by the museum in 2019 [2020/115]

Thonet are often considered to be the world’s first design company, founded in Boppard, Germany in 1819. They have been responsible for many iconic pieces and processes, most obviously their development of bentwood furniture and the No. 14 chair (1859), but also in the realms of flat-packing and mass production. Thonet were also the first company to mass-produce children’s furniture, with the first examples appearing in their catalogues as early as 1866 (see E.2314-997 for a Thonet poster of 1873).

During the 1920s, Thonet were at the forefront of modern furniture design. They became known for innovative and striking pieces made from tubular steel, as opposed to their traditional bentwood construction. The Model B3 (aka ‘Wassily’) club chair designed by Marcel Breuer (see W.2-2005) and the S33 chair by Mart Stam (see CIRC.825-1968) are counted amongst their successes. The latter was the first cantilevered chair in furniture history. Its design and construction were influenced by Stam’s experiments linking together steel gas pipes. The result was a pure and lightweight form which had great influence on Modernist interior design, and on much furniture design that followed.

In 2006, Thonet revisited the design of the S33 when German industrial designer Holger Lange was contracted to design a sledge. The result was the S333, heavily influenced by Stam’s chair. The lightweight aluminium sledge utilises the flex inherent in the cantilevered frame to act as a shock absorber. Like the chair that influenced it, it is also easy to stack with other S333s, and its proportions allow it to be worn as a backpack when it carried up a slope. True to its origins, it appears to be a single, continuous form and is made from only a few pieces. It won the respected IF-Award for Product Design in 2007.

B.16-2019