Georg Leowald

Georg Leowald was one of the most important designers in the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Düsseldorf in 1908, he studied architecture and, after the Second World War, he was appointed Professor of Architecture at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HfBK) in Berlin. In 1949 he was awarded the 1st prize in the competition for industrially manufactured furniture by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. From 1957 he taught product design at the Academy of Design in Ulm (HfG).
For Wilkhahn, he designed numerous, successful ranges in wood and plywood, upholstered furniture and in particular chairs with seat shells in glass fibre-reinforced plastic. As an architect, he also designed a new production building, a boiler house, as well as a hall made from scantlings as an open-air store for unfinished wooden parts. These were all buildings that are still convincing solutions today. In the latter part of his life, Leowald suffered from a mental illness and contact to Wilkhahn ceased. He died in 1969.