Gispen was the company set up by the designer Willem Hendrik Gispen. He trained as an architect, but in 1916 he moved into a studio where he made mainly lamps, decorative ironwork and building ornamentation from cast iron, copper and bronze. Later on he began mass producing his designs and stopped hand-crafting them. From 1926 onwards Gispen made a range of modern lamps under the brand name Giso, and in 1929 he began designing and producing tubular steel furniture. He became part of the vanguard of functionalism, in which practicality was the prime objective and aesthetics were mainly a question of form, structure and materials. He called his products "artless functional objects". Gispen was closely involved in the interior furnishings of Huis Sonneveld. He provided most of the tubular steel furniture and all the lamps. Some of the items of furniture may have been specially designed and produced for the house, before being produced in series, including the two chairs by the sofa in the salon, because they're not quite the same as the standard models; for example, the dining-room chairs have the same armrests as the armchairs in the living room. Little changes like these were used to make the furniture match and to create a family of objects.
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