Gatepac’s standard furniture #gatepac

Furniture and design as part and parcel of modern architecture were a major concern for the GATEPAC (Group of Spanish Architects and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture), because they considered that modern architecture was necessarily linked to a new way of living that was directly expressed by modern furniture.

Furniture is the regular, unavoidable complement of the modern house and it must be designed thinking on its adaptation to our lives and bodies. Furniture is even more directly in touch to people than houses themselves GATEPAC, A.C. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea n15, July 1934.

Accordingly to this, their magazine A.C. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea published a wide range of modern furniture, both designed by the group’s members for local manufacturers and produced by foreign brands such as Artek or Thonet. This same furniture was displayed in the GATEPAC’s headquarters in Barcelona, a double-height space designed by Germán Rodríguez Arias, which also served as a furniture shop called MIVDA (Furniture and Decoration for Contemporary Dwellings) since 1935. Among this furniture it was Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel furniture, displayed in the shop’s lobby as setting up a lounge area.

Furniture is also the defining element in the Roca Jeweller’s built by Josep Lluís Sert and Josep Torres Clavé with the assistance of Antonio Bonet in 1934. The interior space is organised by the disposition of display cases and work tables, following the example of Le Corbusier’s L’Esprit Nouveau Pavilion. Sert also designed for this jeweller’s a plywood armchair, published on the A.C. magazine under the heading “Standard Elements in Furniture”.