Dates: 11th to 13th November 2014

Venue: IDS, Building 8, GTU, 75 Kostava Street, Tbilisi

Event: Thonet’s Stories: In the Footsteps of Distribution. Thonet Chair 

N 14 or a Deconstruction of a Viennese Chair

Format: IDS / University of Applied Arts Vienna Exchange Workshop   Series

Instructor: Prof. James Gilbert Skone (UK-Austria), Industrial & Graphic Designer,University of Applied Arts Vienna

Poster ©Giga Khatiashvili

This was the first workshop in the ongoing series connected to the Georgian legacy of the Austrian cabinet maker Michael Thonet – the author, among many other pieces of furniture, of the famous 1859 Konsumstuhl Nr. 14, or Coffee Shop Chair No. 14, which is called the "chair of chairs" with some 50 million manufactured (and some of them in Georgia, for over a century now – here they are called “Viennese chairs”) and still in production today. The workshop was conducted by British-born Austrian professor James Skone of University of Applied Arts Vienna. Born in 1948, James was educated in London and Vienna and studied interior design in London but is better known as a product designer. An enthusiastic alpinist and extreme athlete, he had designed the necessary equipment for these sports, developing mass produced climbing walls and adjustible climbing shoes, which soon led to commissions for further sporting goods designs for, among others, Fischer Ski, Tyrolia, Dachstein and F2. In partnership with Matthias Peschke, he designed products for AKG (probably their most successful talk- listen device), IMKO, Grabner and Kelomat. Since 2000 James Skone shifted his concentration to teaching. In just three days of the Tbilisi workshop, each of the five teams of students that entered the workshop had demonstrated, under his guidance, a sudden surge in creative potential and had come up with 5 imaginative products (a lamp; a musical instrument; a modern chair and so on) hand-made from the broken pieces of the historical Viennese chairs brought from the homes of the Tbilisi inhabitants.