The architect and designer Klaus Vogt was an influential force in the new design for living pioneered during the buoyant and optimistic years of the late nineteen sixties and early seventies. His furniture is a signpost for a new approach to living that was a far cry from the bourgeois living concepts and the functional aesthetic standards of modernism.
Joan Billing and Samuel Eberli of Design+Design also examine the love of experiment that was alive and flourishing during those times in their monograph study of the Swiss designer Klaus Vogt and the evolving environment with its new and changeable forms of living and multifunctional furnishings. The book also unfolds the story of how the way to these new forms in lifestyle were opened up and developed at that time.
The young Klaus Vogt made good use of the knowledge he had acquired in his apprenticeship as a boat builder in his early chair construction work. After completing an interior design class at the Zurich School of Design with Willy Guhl and working in an architectural practice in the Netherlands he began to develop furniture designs that dropped the sharp edged pattern of the existing standard of the times.
The furniture of Klaus Vogt features forms with the rounded and curved lines familiar to us from boat construction. They break with the standard
design conventions of their time. A new design for living emerged from his pleasure in the play of color, materials, new production techniques and forms of use, which was characterized by the democratic, social and economic approach in the buoyant mood of the times.