While Vjenceslav Richter is a key figure in Croatia’s design canon, he is not yet a household name in North America; for many NeoCon visitors, Croatian furniture brand new collection at The Mart will be their introduction to him (Anyone who attended will be better acquainted; the range made its European debut in April.) And what an introduction it will be, with 20 pieces — including seating, tables and a desk — offering an education in an overlooked chapter of European modernism.
That said, these are not straightforward re-issues; Prostoria describes the Richter collection as “not a return to history but an activation of it.” While Richter had plenty of furniture designs in his archives, none were ever commercially produced — and, until now, several only survive in photographs. Plus, contemporary seating often calls for a coordinating table, but no precedents for these existed.
Accordingly, Prostoria’s range carries Richter’s original logic in entirely new directions. Ultimately, this still follows the architect’s overall ideology: He referred to himself as a “designer of systems,” reflecting toward the end of his career that “because I was ahead of my time, many of my projects remained unrealized.” Now, finally, the world is catching up.
Vjenceslav Richter (1917-2002)
Richter’s built projects include Zagreb’s Presidential Palace, the official workplace of the President of Croatia, but it was his . His Expo 58 pavilion for Yugoslavia (shown above left, in Brussels) was so beloved that it lives on as a schoolhouse in the Flemish town of Wevelgem, and he won the Gold Medal at the 1964 Triennale in Milan for his slatted Yugoslav pavilion (shown above right).
Working between architecture and art (his portfolio is also filled with graphic design, paintings and sculptures, with many works now held in the collections of institutions like ), he was one of the founders of Croatia’s and, later, a member of the New Tendencies — groups that advocated against Socialist Realism and championed art’s embrace of new industrial technologies, respectively. Prostoria president Tomislav Knezović sees Richter’s work as a critical force in growing Croatia’s creative identity on the world stage. “It was a time of strong cultural optimism — something we need again today — when creativity, industry and society were closely connected, and ideas developed in Zagreb were globally relevant,” he says.
2026
To translate Richter’s archives into 21st-century production pieces, Prostoria enlisted three studios — Numen / For Use, Neisako and Grupa — which worked alongside its in-house R&D team. Together, they pored over any surviving pieces (some held in the Museum of Arts and Crafts, others at the Croatian School Museum, both in Zagreb), as well as images and drawings. But the design process involved just as much extrapolation: Fo instance, the visual language of a neo-avant-garde chair first developed for the Art Pavilion in Zagreb was adapted into a desk (VR51).
Meanwhile, seating originally created for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair and 1961 International Labour Exhibition in Turin has been brought back as VR58 (featuring an X-shaped base, shown left) and VR61 (a bent-plywood chair) alongside brand new tables.
Rounding out the collection are VR53, a pair of armchairs based on designs for Umag’s Hotel Adriatic, and VR52, a seat shown at an early EXAT 51 group show. The manifesto at that exhibition called for more synthesis of the visual arts. With its Richter collection, Prostoria keeps that spirit alive, demonstrating the strong overlap between architecture, furniture and history.
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