Utility Research

The chairs are Thonet Bentwood Side Chairs, designed by Bruno Weil. They were used at Pacoima Memorial Lutheran Hospital in the San Fernando Valley. Inventory tags attached to the underside carry the numbers 0526, 0546, and 0573, documenting their institutional use.

Pacoima Memorial Lutheran Hospital opened in 1960 as a memorial connected to the 1957 Pacoima mid-air collision and the children killed and injured when wreckage fell onto Pacoima Junior High School. The hospital was severely damaged in the 1971 San Fernando earthquake and subsequently rebuilt. It later operated as Lake View Medical Center before financial problems forced its closure in March 1986.

Designed by Bruno Weil for Thonet, the chairs used molded plywood to achieve a lightweight chair from a small number of curved components. Examples of the model are generally dated to the mid-20th century.

A surviving manufacturer’s tag reads: “Thonet, One Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. The best known name in contract furniture since 1830.” The chairs were produced by Thonet Industries, Inc., the American branch of the company founded by Michael Thonet. Although very different from Thonet’s nineteenth-century bent-beech furniture, they continue the company’s exploration of bending wood for economical serial production.

All three chairs also carry large black marker inscriptions reading “MTM,” whose meaning remains unknown.

Water staining, veneer failure, and cracking of the plywood suggest that the chairs were exposed to damp conditions at some point after their institutional use. The surviving hospital inventory tags, Thonet labels, worn surfaces, repairs, and accumulated damage preserve the history of objects designed for institutional service—and which continued to exist long after the institution itself disappeared.