The CH26 dining chair by Hans J. Wegner was put into production by Carl Hansen & Søn in close collaboration with the Hans J. Wegner Design Studio and in accordance with Wegner’s original working drawing. The chair is part of a series of iconic chairs Wegner created for Carl Hansen & Søn. Along with the CH22 lounge chair, Wegner created a working drawing for translating the lounge chair’s form into a dining chair, the CH26. Yet he never actually manufactured a mock-up of the armchair and it remained unknown to the public for decades. In 2016 – the same year as the reintroduction of the CH22 – Carl Hansen & Søn brought the CH26 design to life. The CH26 dining chair closely resembles the lounge version with its organic shapes, refined back and hand-woven seat, and features proportions ideal for longer periods of sitting at a dining table or a desk
Son of a shoe-maker in southern Jutland, Hans Wegner, finished his formal training as a cabinetmaker with master cabinetmaker Stahlberg in 1930 before starting at Teknologisk Institut in Copenhagen. He soon moved to the School of Arts and Crafts in the Danish capital where he became architect in 1938, and started teaching in 1946.
In 1940 he joined Arne Jacobsen and Erik Møller in Arhus, to design the furniture for the new Arhus city hall. He started to work with 'minister' cabinetmaker Johannes Hansen in 1940 and showed his first furniture in the famous Hansen store on Bredgade 65 in 1941. Johannes Hansen was more than twice as old as the 26 year old Wegner but the unique collaboration between the two became the undisputed backbone of Danish furniture design and the main reason for it's world wide recognition in the fifties and sixties. The Copenhagen Museum of Art and Industry acquired the first Wegner chair in 1942.
In 1943 he started his own design office and 1 year later designed the first of a long series of 'chinese' chairs inspired by portraits of Danish merchants sitting in Ming chairs for Fritz Hansen. In 1950 Wegner designed the “Wishbone Chair” produced by Carl Hansen & Søn in Odense which became the most successful of all Wegner chairs. Most well known for it’s use by Kennedy and Nixon in their famous CBS TV debate of 1960.
Inspiration
