Interior architect and furniture maker Elmar Berkovich (1897-1986) was no great innovator, but he did have a great sense of the zeitgeist and knew what his customers needed. He created designs for the well-to-do clients of stylish Metz & Co., as well as for the labourers of the Philips factories. On 2 December, Stichting BONAS published a monograph on Berkovich, opening up the first inventory of his designs ever.

In his day, Elmar Berkovich was a highly valued and productive furniture maker and interior architect. Interest in him dwindled later, as art historians shifted their attention to innovators, such as the artists of De Stijl. Berkovich was modern, yet had an eye for the beauty of tradition and crafts. His designs matched the period perfectly. He particularly made a name for himself with luxury bedroom interiors for the affluent clientele of Metz & Co. After 1947, when he started working at Philips in Eindhoven, he was given the opportunity to go in a different direction. Spectacular by the standards of his day, his colour schemes for working environments and factory canteens may not have been unique, but they were certainly radical and groundbreaking.




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Metz & Co.
Berkovich was born in Budapest, which he left in 1922 to escape Admiral Miklos Horthy’s repressive regime. As a professional furniture maker, he became head of the Amsterdam furniture workshop of Metz & Co., a leading home furnishings shop that primarily served style-conscious and well-off customers from the Gooi area, Wassenaar and The Hague. At the same time, the company promoted itself as a manufacturer of and platform for functionalist interior art. Berkovich was responsible for making designs by Rietveld, Breuer, Huszar, Salomonson, Oud and Van der Leck. Later on, he also designed his own furniture and lamps. He was a great champion of cooperation between artists and manufacturers. Artistic though it may be, a design without a commercial basis in a company would never suffice.




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The ‘Nieuwe Wonen’
When Berkovich arrived in Amsterdam, the ‘Nieuwe Bouwen’, the Dutch branch of the International School of Modernism, was in its infancy. Rooted in ideological inspiration, progressive architects set themselves up to improve the living conditions of workers. Quality, light and hygienic living spaces were to replace the poorly built, dark and cramped working-class homes. Designs had to be functional, building materials standardised and production industrialised.

Influenced by the ‘Nieuwe Bouwen’, interior decoration also set out to devise an entirely new style of design called the ‘Nieuwe Wonen’, the aim of which was to create a harmonious whole. Various architects started designing functionalist furniture and lamps. Functionalism, light and space also set the trend in Dutch interiors. Typical characteristics were an asymmetrical layout, furniture with straight planes and geometrical volumes, matt or white glass spheres instead of lampshades, and upholstery in primary colours in an otherwise predominantly white interior.

Comfort and aesthetics
Having started in the 1920s as a socialist revolution of sorts, the ‘Nieuwe Wonen’ increasingly focused on aesthetics and comfort in the 1930s. Avant-garde and experiment made way for consolidation and respectability. There was more room for decoration, tradition, monumentalism and ‘warmer’ materials. Steel tubular furniture was adopted in households, albeit in a comfortable version and often combined with wood and cane.
In the second half of the 1930s, Metz & Co. also abandoned minimalist functionalism and their designs became friendlier and more organic across the board. Berkovich warmly supported this development, having never been a supporter of the radical use of metal and glass, and having always preferred wood, based on the tradition of his craft.








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Philips
After the war, Berkovich left Metz & Co. for the Philips Lichtadviesbureau. In those days, Philips wanted to pay more attention to aesthetic design, not only for product development, but also for the sake of their own employees. Berkovich was tasked with providing advice on the use of colour and lighting in the Philips canteens, offices and factories to improve their appeal and create a more pleasant working environment. The appreciation he gained from Philips workers and board members alike gave him free rein in this field in France, Belgium, England, Spain, Germany, Greece and Turkey.




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When he visited branches in these countries, he found ‘grimy workspaces in black, grey and brown that were poorly lit’. His observations of the workers convinced him that a working environment with the right colours and lighting would yield a better production result. He also applied colours to the machines and tools that were part of the working environment. He found that each country had its own preferred colours, depending on such aspects as climate, flora and fauna.

Colourist
Berkovich called himself a ‘colourist’ and approached his profession from a scientific perspective. As early as the 1920s, he experimented with colours in order to measure their physiological effects on test subjects. He expounded on his ideas of colours and lighting in about twenty articles and lectures. Although guided by physiology and psychology, he based his ideas primarily on his own research and experience.






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Freelance interior architect
He left Philips in 1959. Throughout the entire period from 1947 until his death in 1968, he continued – alongside his work for Philips – to do what he was good at: designing beautiful, suitable interiors for individuals and companies. In that post-war design practice, he extricated himself from what was, basically, a rather limited and monotonous flow of orders at Metz & Co. Berkovich’s finest hour came in the 1960s, when a retrospective of his work was organised, first in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1962), and then in the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven (1963).




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BONAS publication
Elmar Berkovich, meubelontwerper en interieurarchitect, 1897-1968 [Elmar Berkovich, furniture designer and interior architect, 1897-1968] / Harry Broekman and Madeleine Lim; ed. Radboud van Beekum [et al.]. – Rotterdam, Stiching BONAS, 2011.
Order from www.bonas.nl, and available in bookshops. Price: €29.

Research for this publication was conducted in various archives, including the Netherlands Architecture Institute (E. Berkovich archive, H. Salomonson archive, glass negatives and slides archive), Amsterdam City Archives (Metz & Co archive), Audax Textile Museum collection and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam collection.

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