The 1950s proved to be politically and economically favorable to initiatives related to industrial production. The Target Plan and the construction of Brasília, which transferred the capital of Brazil from the city of Rio de Janeiro to the Central Plateau, consisted of important incentives for the validation and consolidation of modern architecture, as well as for the development of industrial design.

During this period, the city of São Paulo was entering an accelerated pace of urban expansion and verticalization, with a significant increase in the middle class and important changes in housing configurations. Within this new context, the creation of more accessible and compact furniture was necessary and spurred several initiatives more attentive to this type of proposal.

Among these initiatives, the work of the Polish naturalized Brazilian architect, Jorge Zalszupin, presented itself as one of the most versatile. His work as a designer, entrepreneur and manager is an example of a transition process from the artisanal production mode, with unique and custom pieces, to serial industrial production and, during the 1960s and 1970s, Zalszupin`s L'atelier was transformed from a small carpentry company that designed custom parts for homes and offices based on traditional machinery and procedures into a mechanized 200 employees factory.

Born in June 1922, in the city of Warsaw, Poland, Jorge (Jerzy) Zalszupin attended the School of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Bucharest. In 1949, after some years working as an architect in the north of France, Zalszupin emigrated to São Paulo where he joined the office team of the Polish architect, Luciano (Lucjan) Korngold. In 1953, Zalszupin became a Brazilian citizen and started to sign his own projects in his new architectural firm, the Técnico Prumo Ltda Office, which offered architectural and construction services for buildings and residences, as well as decoration and furniture projects, made to order.

His work as an architect generated a great demand for decoration and furniture projects that fit his aesthetic proposal, which led Zalszupin to found, in 1959, L'atelier Móveis, with a first collection focused on residential furniture, which was presented in the new showroom at Conjunto Nacional.

Zalszupin's initial goal was to produce a series of 25 to 50 units with high quality materials and noble and modern finishes combined with the latest technologies in a small factory set up in a warehouse on Avenida do Estado. The works of this first phase of L'Atelier put their stake on the execution and details of handmade joinery with noble materials, such as leather, marble and rosewood, but already introducing some techniques and materials considered innovative, such as molded laminated wood and even a chair with shell plastic armored with fiberglass.

One of the first references that influenced Zalszupin's work at L'Atelier was the São Paulo manufacturer Branco & Preto, from which the production was essentially handmade. However, even after the success of its first collection, produced primarily by hand, the adoption of a series production model and on a larger scale proved necessary, as the process of designing and manufacturing the custom furniture required different steps from the industrialized furniture. It was more laborious and more expensive to produce, undergoing constant changes during its elaboration and execution phase.

Much more than rationalizing design - which seemed to limit his ambitions of more plastic and organic forms -, Zalszupin focused mainly on the acquisition and use of new technologies and materials to make series production viable.

This focus on new technologies and materials meant a path to the aesthetic freedom that he desired so much, and the molded laminated rosewood allowed the designer to execute the longed-for curves without necessarily implying the adoption of long and expensive manual processes, as the process of the Danish armchair arms.

Although his ideas were not limited to available technologies, technological innovations and new materials generated entire product lines, as the molding of heat laminates, which results inspired many of his creations and ended up becoming one of the differentials of his work in relation to the work of his contemporaries.

To continue investing in technologies, it was necessary to guarantee a number of sales and a production flow. For this, Zalszupin developed a line of modular furniture to serve both residential and corporate environments. This strategy was also adopted by several of his contemporary enthusiasts of industrial production in series, such as Michel Arnoult and Geraldo de Barros, as it allows a greater rationalization of the stages and production processes, in addition to increasing production and lowering the costs of the final product.

The different possibilities of combining the storage modules allowed the production of a wide variety of sets, which meant greater flexibility of use and the compatibility of these sets with different spaces and needs, increasing, thus, the market scope for this type of furniture.

One of its most successful lines was the storage furniture with component modules. Through modular units of standardized measures, it was possible to assemble sideboards and buffets, dressing tables, bedside tables, benches and various shelves: simple shelves, partition shelves, bar shelves, library shelves or shelves with desks. The modules could be opened or closed, with one or two doors, with drawers, with a screen enclosure for speakers or with a tilting door for mounting a bar or a box for record players.

The sets could be mounted on wooden bases or crossed metal feet and, of course, some hollow corner elements had a curved bottom. For this line, Zalszupin even developed the hinges, which functioned as a decorative detail of the piece.

The cover was made of marquetry cups or plain plates and, in the mid-1960s, L'atelier also started offering melamine covers in vibrant colors.

Zalszupin also used creative alternatives to circumvent production problems, such as high cost or material shortages. The most notable of these was the marquetry finish in the design of bricks or tacos, a process that became known as “taqueamento”. It consists of gluing various pieces of rosewood flowers of varying textures and shades on a furniture surface. This solution was widely used by him and ended up becoming one of the marks of his work.

With the use of marquetry finishing, he was able to solve several problems: it reduced the waste of material; it facilitated the process of covering large surfaces, as in table tops - since finding large rosewood flowers was already a challenge; it smoothed the variations in shades of the leaves that covered different modules of the same piece of furniture; and, finally, it made the production costs of the parts cheaper.

I thought about combining several patterns of rosewood, lighter, darker, with different types of veins, that is, creating a new pattern so that all desks would combine with each other, hence the idea of the rosewood patchwork(...) It was a technique that we developed and that helped to produce furniture industrially with a sophisticated marquetry. I started using this new pattern on other furniture (...). At some point, we had a complete line that, by the way, was very successful at the time.

(By Jorge Zalszupin to Sérgio Campos in Sept. / Oct. 2009. In: “Zalszupin: 50 anos de design de mobiliário.” Exhibition catalog. São Paulo: Galeria Artemobília, Nov. 2009, p. 5.)

L'Atelier's growth was intensified by expanding the product portfolio with the introduction of office furniture. The sales volume of this type of furniture was higher and the market was more consistent and less subject to fads. In addition it did not require exclusive designs. However, in order not to be limited to just one type of market, Zalszupin tried to create hybrid pieces that would serve both the corporate and domestic environment.

Some examples of this versatility are the Senior armchairs, in which the armrests design allows them to be used on dining or meeting tables, on desks, or arranged in pairs in a living room; the Guarujá and Guanabara dining or meeting tables, with a central leg made of reinforced concrete covered with leather and a rosewood patchwork top; and the line of desks also covered with marquetry rosewood patchwork.

Even though initially designing mainly wooden furniture in which the use of iron, leather and jacarandá predominated, with a modern aesthetics and clear Scandinavian influences, the introduction of plastic would not be long in coming. In 1968, L'Atelier acquired the production rights for the Polyside chair, a Robin Day project for the British furniture manufacturer Hille, rented the mold for the shell injection, and started to produce it using a polypropylene injector from the manufacturer of Hévea plastic utensils. The initiative, which at first appeared to be risky due to the fact that the use of plastic in furniture had been still very recent, was welcomed by the market and motivated a significant expansion of the use of this material in L'Atelier`s production.

Grupo Forsa

At the end of 1970, the Ferragens e Laminação Brasil S.A. (FBL) factory, led by entrepreneurs Grigore Vladimirschi and Sergio Vladimirschi, consolidated a merger with L'Atelier Móveis.

Assembled and headed by Jorge Zalszupin, the team of designers, draftsmen and engineers worked without division by areas of expertise. Everyone worked on different product fronts, collaborating and interfering in projects in an open and horizontal way. The goal was to guarantee a design and production structure that would allow great creative freedom and work with a wide range of products - such as computers, appliances, furniture, plastic utensils and metal hardware.

In 1971, FLB acquired the shares of Hevea SA Indústria de Plásticos, which supplied finished products and molded or laminated raw materials to the market or other industries. They supplied materials such as ABS, polycarbonate and polypropylene, so another subsidiary was added to the FLB group, which was then renamed Grupo Forsa (Ferragens e Organizações Reunidas SA).

The scenario that unfolded in the early 1970s in Brazil, amongst the verticalization of cities, the growth of the urban population, the great construction works happening in Brasília and the implantation of the national petrochemical industry, seemed promising for the growth of the new holding company. The company published extremely positive balance sheets. In 1973, L'atelier expanded the manufacturing plants, adding another another 3,000 m2 to its original area, and the subsidiaries acquired new and modern vacuum molding equipment, greenhouses and injectors.

One of the reflexes of the use of plastic in furniture was the creation of modern and almost futuristic products, such as the partitions and panels for office bays, which cutouts and projections served to support the most diverse types of objects, such as telephones, correspondence and office material.

Even though he still designed luxury furniture with wood and handmade techniques made to order, Zalszupin managed, at that moment, to free himself from the “stradivarius complex” and to distance himself from his contemporaries by extrapolating domestic furniture and its traditional materials. The new and diverse resources available made it possible to think the product on a truly industrial scale, going beyond the small series to which traditional wooden furniture was limited.

Zalszupin admitted that most of the things he wanted to do were either impossible or very difficult to do and that, on many occasions, he had to stay within the resources and productive possibilities available. He did so even for his own survival in the market.

His production seemed to oscillate between references and affinities with his national and international contemporaries and the desire to realize his most creative ideas and experiences, satisfying a personal need for individual expression and reconciling his aesthetic desires with the productive reality:

I think that the act of creating does not proceed, in my case, exclusively or predominantly from logical or rigorous reflection, which could be expected from a scientific spirit. It has much more to do with something intuitive, even sensual, only censored and granted on its development by the rational. As if an object to be created had to contain a non-logical message that would satisfy non-logical needs and would be difficult to explain. (...) It is obvious that this cannot happen at the price of the logic sacrifice: comfort, adaptability to the means of production and other items necessary for the good development of an object..

The designer took on, at various times, his need to link the furniture to the body, to bring coziness and play with impossible shapes and different materials. However, even though he approached the humanistic premises of Scandinavian design and Organic Design more than German rationalism, Zalszupin was not concerned with following rules and created a unique work, which reflected his constant search for experimentation and transformation.

Perhaps much of the aesthetic appeal and the current commercial importance of his furniture has to do with the distinction of the materials, the quality of the design, the processes adopted and the concept they represent as a translation of the spirit of that time they were produced. Above all, however, its value is due on the sensitivity, perseverance, boldness and freedom that Jorge Zalszupin managed to materialize in his creations.

Mariana Vieira de Andrade holds a master's degree from the Architecture and Urbanism Faculty at the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP) and a Bachelor's Degree in Industrial Design at University Presbiteriana Mackenzie. Her work in the area has an emphasis on visual programming and product design activities, mainly in the development of furniture products, jewelry, visual identity and editorial design. Her research is in the social history of design, design methodology, design language and creative processes.