Vladimir Kagan
New York's postwar apartments wanted furniture that could curve the way a conversation does. Vladimir Kagan gave them the serpentine sofa, the sculptural lounge chair, the low, splayed-leg forms that made American modernism look less like a factory and more like a body at rest.
Raised in his cabinetmaker father's workshop in Germany and later New York, and trained in architecture at Columbia, Kagan opened his own workshop in 1949, before he turned twenty-two. Morentz presents a selection of his work ā from the serpentine sofas that made his name to the sinuous lounge seating and case pieces produced in his own workshop rather than through industrial manufacturers.
The workshop kid who redrew the American sofa
Born in Germany to a Russian-trained master cabinetmaker, Kagan emigrated with his family to New York in 1938, fleeing the Nazi regime. He grew up working alongside his father in the family workshop ā an apprenticeship in construction that predates, and quietly underlies, everything he later studied at Columbia's School of Architecture.
In 1949 he opened his own shop in New York and, within the year, partnered with retailer Dreyfuss to found Kagan-Dreyfuss on East 57th Street. His free-form Serpentine sofa and low, curved seating set him apart from the boxier, suburban-facing furniture of his American contemporaries.
Furniture for a new kind of urban interior
Kagan designed for a sophisticated, city-dwelling clientele rather than the mass market ā commissions ranged from the Delegates' Cocktail Lounge at the United Nations to Disneyland's Monsanto House of the Future in 1964. Even his more geometric work carried the same logic of the body: the Unicorn chair of about 1960, its V-shaped pedestal inspired by a Brancusi sculpture he had seen in a museum, is a study in how far a form can curve before it stops being furniture.
Because his designs resisted easy mass production, Kagan largely avoided long-term ties to major manufacturers ā a choice that kept his workshop small and made his surviving 1950s and 60s pieces genuinely scarce.
Chairs are uniquely the best expression of design. They encompass more of the challenges by which I live and work than any other single component of furniture.