Switzerland produced an impressive list of architects and designers during the 20th century. Two of them are Robert and Trix Haussmann. Robert Haussmann first studied interior design under Wilhelm Kienzle and Willy Guhl in Zurich at the Kunstgewerbeschule, and received his diploma in 1943. He worked for several design firms over the next ten years and attended lectures and exhibitions devoted to architecture, interior design and the fledgling field of industrial design. Haussmann was frequently at his father’s interior design and furniture shop in Zurich.1
“When my father died in 1955,” Robert Haussmann said in an interview, “I set up business with my brother on Oberdorfstrasse because I wanted to get away from period furniture and wallpaper. There were rooms in the back where I had my drafting table to work on interior architecture. My furniture was sold in the store but there wasn’t much at first. We established a lot of contacts that way.”2
Haussmann decided to explore the possibilities of steel in furniture as displayed by Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. The first piece produced out of the Zurich shop was a variant of one by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich not available in Switzerland. During the same period, he served as assistant to architect Florian Adler at Eternit AG in Niederurnen, southeast of Zurich. He designed a series of chairs for De Sede of Switzerland which were introduced in 1955.3
Haussmann joined the Schweizerischer Werkbund (SWB), a professional organization of architects, interior designers, artists and other creative entrepreneurs. In 1957, the SWB invited Haussmann to design a model apartment for the Intebau exhibit in Berlin. The following year he participated in the New Metal Furniture exhibit at a Zurich design museum.
It was, perhaps, inevitable that Robert Haussmann would cross paths with Trix Högl. She came from an influential architectural design family. In 1963 she had just completed her architectural studies at ETH Zurich when she was invited to be on the planning board for Expo 64. In turn, in 1963 the board of Expo 64 invited Haussmann to design a chair for the exhibition. The completed chair became known as, simply, the Expo Chair.4
“After meeting in Lausanne at Expo 64,” Trix Haussmann explained, “we saw each other again in 1966 at a Luginbűhl exhibition at Galerie Ziegler in Zurich. We got married in 1967 and founded a design office together.”5
Besides interior design commissions, they designed furniture for other manufacturers throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. This eventually involved a collection for Knoll International in the latter half of 1988. The Haussmann Collection included a Club Chair, Settee and Sofa, and a Sofa System with modular component to expand and configure the seating unit as required.6 They chose mirror to be available for the sides and back of their club chair, settee and sofa. (This was not available on the Sofa System).
“You might say that we are interested in ‘disturbed reality’, the disturbance of form by ornament,” they said in an interview. “We link things that don’t go together and, in order to do this, we rely increasingly on the mirror as a virtual reality: with a mirror, you can destroy the real, enlarge it, change it. But material remains an important device.”7
The Haussmann Collection was offered as a free-standing Club Chair, Settee and Sofa, and could be ordered as a Sofa System for contract clients in any desired length and width configuration in various leathers and fabrics, but the most striking were those with glass mirror sides and back. The collection was offered from 1988 to at least 2005.8.
1. Arthur Rűegg, ed. Swiss Furniture and Interiors in the 20th Century. (Basel: Birkhäuser – Publishers for Architecture, 2002). 426,
2. Dieter Schwarz, A Life with Art and Artists Trix and Robert Haussmann. (Zurich: Edition Patrick Frey, 2021). 137
3. MassModernDesign furniture listing. https://massmoderndesign.com/gallery-detail/robert-hausmann-rh-304-chairs-de-sede-switzerland-1955/.
4. Rűegg. 192.
5. Schwarz. 157.
6. KnollStudio Price List 1990. 64-67.
7. Dominikus Müller, “Life in Design: Trix and Robert Haussmann,” Frieze Magazine, Issue 195. https://www.frieze.com/article/life-design-trix-and-robert-haussmann.
8. KnollStudio Price List 2005. 70-71. The Haussmann Sofa System was manufactured through 1996 according to the Price List but was not listed in the Price List 1998. The Haussmann Collection Lounge Seating (chair, settee and sofa) were not in the KnollStudio Price List 2008.