Chapter 2 of 24
Le Corbusier Design For Venesta Stand At Building Trades Exhibition, London 1930
That really was the beginning of things. Venesta, manufacturers of plywood, had factories in Estonia, Latvia, Finland, and one in Paris. They were regarding their main product of plywood as a cheap substitute for solid and, of course, economic wise and engineering wise it seemed to be a nonsense. The problem was how to find new uses. At that time, I was just beginning to read about and hear about an extraordinary organisation called the Bauhaus. They seemed to be using materials in all sorts of strange ways.
The young architects seemed to me to be the ones to look for. There seemed to be very few. There was Max Fry, there was Serge Chermayeff, and then of course Wells Coates. Now Wells was doing work for Cresta. I'm not sure whether he came to me or I went to him, but it became a sort of "back-scratching" business because I wanted photographs of how he was using plywood in a very straight-forward introductory way.