Project archive

The Bröhan Design Foundation researches the life and work of the architect and designer Kálmán Lengyel. Lengyel is known as a partner in the earliest tubular steel furniture manufacturer Standard-Möbel, which was founded together with Marcel Breuer in Berlin in 1927. In addition, there is so far only a little information about the Hungarian native.

Current: Research on the partial estate of the architects and designers Kálmán und László Lengyel.

Kálmán Lengyel was born on July 18, 1900 in Szeged and lived in Berlin, Paris and Budapest. He comes from an upper-middle-class Jewish family that has been involved in furniture manufacturing for generations. His father’s company received awards at the Paris World Exhibition. In the 1920s, Lengyel pursued various architectural projects in Berlin and founded his own furniture company, Ka-Le-Möbel, after Standard-Möbel. He worked as an interior designer in Paris and built in Szeged and Budapest. His style consistently combines clarity and homeliness in the sense of applied modernity. At the end of 1944, Kálmán Lengyel was deported to Germany as a Jew and died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

The Bröhan Design Foundation is attempting to introduce this important designer in this connection to the Bauhaus and modern architecture and to document his work as a furniture designer and interior designer in a publication and an exhibition.

There are other people of interest in Kálmán Lengyel’s circle: Marcel Breuer as a designer and business partner, Anton Lorenz, who was briefly registered as managing director of Standard-Möbel; His wife Hajnal Lengyel-Pataky designed advertising material for the two furniture companies. Kálmán’s brother László also worked as an architect and designer and later worked as a painter and author in the Paris Surrealist circle. His wife was the photographer and writer Ilse Schneider-Lengyel, in whose house in the Allgäu the Group 47 was founded.

A publication by the Bröhan Design Foundation on this topic is in preparation and will be published by Arnoldsche Art Publishers Stuttgart in spring 2023. You can also get more information on the Project Kálmán Lengyel website.

One of the most influential graphic designers of the 20th century