Background

Tecta’s industrial park – DIE MODERNE BY TECTA

In the small town of Lauenförde the designcompany Tecta, lead by Axel Bruchhäuser has its headquarters. Only a milestone from the Documenta grounds in Kassel, Axel created an ‘industrial garden’. In an open landscape several pavilions invite visitors to enjoy industry and art. There is the office building with a glass look-out, a glass and steal Wewerka pavilion (1982) which he designed for Documenta, a portal-frame by Jean Prouvé and the cantilever-chair-museum existing out of three different glass constructions designed by the Smithsons (2002). Transparency is clearly the motto of Tecta.

‘Design ist Müll’ (design is garbage). With this sentence Bruchhäuser starts a monologue on contemporary design. Somehow strange for a director of a design company and a chair-museum, but while listening it becomes clear that Bruchhauser is a mayor investor in modernist design and its history. What he denounces is the mediagenetic and spectacular design which is mainly driven by temporary fashions and trends in a capitalistic framework.
Since 1972 he and his father started reproducing old and sometimes forgotten products from the Bauhaus masters and other modernists. In some cases, starting from a photograph they meticulously reconstructed a furniture piece and then presented it to the designer. For some of the production licenses Bruchhäuser traveled all over Europe and even into Russia, to find the masters. Mart Stam he found after four years searching around a sea in Switzerland, El Lizzitsky’s widow in a housingestate in Siberia.
All products from the Bauhaus to the designs by Wewerka and the Smithsons are according to Bruchhäuser designed in the same spirit of Modern Movement. His company Tecta is not interested in trendy colours or fast selling products, but persuaded by the ideas of the ‘Modern Movement’. Historical icons as the Rietveld L 40 lamp, the Gropius director’s chair, the Breuer, ‘Folding armchair B4, (1926), the Bauhaus cradle, by Peter Keler (1922), the re-issuing of Prouvé’s furniture from 1982 on, and of course the furniture pieces by Peter and Alison Smithson.
For nearly 30 years TECTA is devoted to the re-edition of original and licensed furniture designs of the Modern Period. The famous German architectural theorist Prof. Dr. Heinrich Klotz wrote about TECTA:
"TECTA is now realizing what the Bauhaus masters waited for in vain. Many of the furniture designs of the international avantgarde of the 1920s, for example Breuer's glass case and folding chair or Gropius' Fagus Factory armchair, have been produced by machine for the first time by TECTA and thus become reasonably priced articles for our homes. In this respect TECTA is fulfilling in Germany a function similar to that of Cassina in Italy and Knoll International in the USA."

TECTA continues to work in the committment to the Modern Movement – a movement which, as Peter Smithson put it, “…is not legacy in the sense of a sum of money to be spent or speculated with…it is a genetic stance, a responsibility…something to live up to.”