Page 53 - Studio International - April 1973

(Far left)
Decanter, tumbler and wine-glass, V2 1928
Coll. Haags Gemeentemuseum
(Left)
Lectern, First Church of Christ Scientist
The Hague, 1926
(Bottom left)
Front of Paris restaurant, rue Pigalle, 5926
(Bottom right)
First floor of Paris restaurant, 1926

factories and offices. small rooms had to be fitted out as a bar and Depression.
A very interesting part is the organ, for which restaurant. Space had to be utilized as When Piet Zwart left the Berlage office in the
Piet Zwart invented a completely new form efficiently as possible. Piet Zwart devised a spring of 1927, he was already busy making
without decoration or mute pipes and based on basic four-colour scheme and applied the sketches for a set of crystal drinking glasses. His
the visible disposition of the organ-pipes in a colours in big asymmetric rectangles to the own title for it was V2, which was not an
Dutch barrel-organ. The two lecterns below the walls and ceiling. The lighting consisted of the arbitrary 'technical' title but the description of
organ took an equally curious form; while he familiar Behrens lamps, small protruding its design. All of the dimensions gave ratios
was working on the design he wrote to his wife squares with bare bulbs and long horizontal (e.g. height of stem: height of cup)
(who was then working as a nurse): 'They will strips of tubular lamps. Light and colour were corresponding to 1:V2, which was one of the
be very simple, and almost float on their thin used to create a spacious effect; the materials standards of industrial normalization (such as
metal tubes; they will be suggestive of parts of emphasized functionality (hygiene, efficient the DIN-sizes). The use of this module
machinery, a typewriter or one of the shiny operation) and the principle of normalization symbolized the conscious acceptance of
instruments in your operating-room, but in no (train windows, chairs by Thonet). The nick- industrial mass production of 'types', as an
way of romanticism, mysticism, or anything
old-fashioned.'10 name, Ford a manger, suggested by a critic, economic and social necessity.
summarizes Zwart's intentions. When the Such ideas meant a struggle with architects
The same year brought a private commission restaurant opened — in September of 1926 — and designers, whose thinking in this period
in. Some of his early typographic work and Mondrian, Baumeister, Prampolini, Loos, and was still dominated largely by principles in the
industrial designs had been on show at the Paris others were present, but before too long Faust spirit of William Morris. They had seen the
World Fair in 1925. There he had met a Dutch was to write: 'The people who like the interior emergence of the De Stijl movement and the
journalist, Leo Faust, who asked him to design do not have enough money to buy my meals.' Russian constructivists as well as the impact of
his new restaurant in the Rue Pigalle. Two The restaurant did not survive the Great the Bauhaus, but still failed to recognize the

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