The Donkey bookcase, perfect for paperbacks

Isokon furniture was adored by 1930s Modernists, and none of it more so than the Donkey

THE GERMANS HAVE one of their compound words for it – Existenzminimum, subsistence-level living. A pared-back but not impoverished minimal living space was a concept that gripped the European progressive architectural community in the 1920s and ’30s, not least among the members of the Bauhaus, the seminal art school founded in Weimar in 1919 by Walter Gropius. For the practitioners of Modernism, the elimination of extraneous detail became a cult-like obsession, which in half-timbered mock-Tudor Britain met with much resistance and considerable ridicule.

In Britain, Jack Pritchard and wife Molly were among the first of the few who fully embraced the idea of the minimalist lifestyle. The dramatic block of flats in Lawn Road, Hampstead, that they commissioned and which is now referred to as the Isokon building (Octane 195), was conceived along the Modernist principle expressed by architect Le Corbusier as ‘a machine for living in’. Designed by expatriate Canadian Welles Coates, the modest units displayed a masterful use of space with cleverly designed built-in furniture.

Pritchard worked for Venesta, importer of plywood, initially for tea chests (Octane 176). And in 1935, while maintaining his day job, ‘Plywood Jack’, as he was often referred to, formed the Isokon Furniture Company to produce moulded plywood furniture in the modern idiom.

During the 1930s many of the key figures from the Bauhaus, escaping the tyranny of Nazism, lodged in or around the Lawn Road flats. Among them were Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Lázló Maholy-Nagy, all of whom contributed to Isokon before moving on to the US and greater achievements. Breuer created Isokon’s ‘Long Chair’, a plywood variant on one of his tubular steel Bauhaus designs.

A latecomer at Lawn Road was the Austrian architect Egon Riss. Born in 1901 in Vienna, Riss graduated from the Vienna Institute of Technology and Science in 1923. His Jewish descent meant that in 1938 he had to flee Vienna, now under Nazi rule, and on the recommendation of Gropius he too found accommodation in the Lawn Road flats.

Paying his way with projects for Pritchard, Riss was responsible for one of Isokon’s most endearing pieces – a compact, floor-standing bookcase companion to the Long Chair called the Donkey – so-named because it had four legs and two panniers. The panniers act as bookshelves while the central slot is used to store newspapers and magazines. Riss also designed a smaller inverted wall-hung version called ‘Gull’ due to its wing-like cross section.

Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books (Octane 89), the perfect books for the new minimalist lifestyle, was clearly impressed by the Donkey and offered Prichard free publicity for it by inserting a promotional leaflet in every Penguin paperback, at which point it was officially renamed the Penguin Donkey.

For the bibliophile with a taste for oenophilia, Riss also designed a version with a modified pannier to hold bottles and glasses, wittily called the Bottleship. Now lost to posterity, there was also a smaller version, even more amusingly named the Pocket Bottleship – a play on the British name for the trio of heavily armed Deutschland-class German cruisers then lurking menacingly in the Atlantic.

However, the outbreak of war in 1939 led to the supply of plywood from Estonia being cut off, resulting in Pritchard’s small business ‘delaminating’. Only around 100 Donkeys were produced, and at the time of writing an original is on offer for a startling £12,650.

Post-war, Riss relocated to Scotland and a distinguished career as the chief architect for the Scottish Coal Board.

Pritchard also had much to occupy his time, but in 1963 he decided to revive Isokon furniture and hired Ernest Race to redesign some of the 1930s pieces, including an updated version of the Donkey. Donkey MkII is an altogether boxier affair, retaining the pannier idea but constructed of flat panels and designed for home assembly.

In 1981, Pritchard passed the Isokon manufacturing licence to Chris McCourt’s Windmill Furniture, which has evolved into Isokon Plus, from whom you can still obtain a Donkey – MkI or II.