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Peill & Putzler

Peill & Putzler, known for their glassware and lighting, are anything but mundane. They are admired for their futuristic and innovative design for the time.

The company was founded at the start of a post-war design boom. It resulted from the 1947 merger of Peill & Söhn and Gebrüder Putzler.

In 1903, Leopold Peill, a philanthropist and glassmaker, founded the Peill & Söhn glass factory in Düren, Germany, specializing in cut glass for tableware. He became an important German manufacturer and, from 1933, Peill was president of the Aachen Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Notable employees of Peill & Söhn included designer Wolfgang von Wersin, architect Georg Metzendorf and graphic designer Fritz Rehm.

When Peill & Putzler Glashütte was founded in 1947, the factory remained in Düren, but was expanded (to include 5 furnaces) with the partnership of Gebrüder Putzler Glashütte from Penzig, Silesia, which, from 1869, specialized in the creation of light fittings.
At its peak, the factory was the largest employer in Düren, with 1,500 employees.
Building on Peill's long tradition of working with leading designers, the company hired German designer Wilhelm Wagenfeld, a former student and craftsman at the Weimar Bauhaus, who designed the lighting for the company from 1952 to 1958. His sinuous, minimalist designs are still associated with the company.

Peill & Putzler was a founding member of the Design Council in 1953 and it was during this decade that it became a leading force in the country's design industry, specializing in tableware, vases and pendant lamps in glass and crystal.
Other collaborators during this period included industrial designer and historian Wilhelm Braun-Feldweg (1908-1998), glass designer Aloys Ferdinand Gangkofner and graphic artist and designer Helmut Demary. In the 1960s, the skilled glassmaker and ceramist Horst Tüselmann designed art glass for them, bringing with him his unique aesthetic vision. His creations included vases and bowls with metallic inclusions in the body, glass with embossed surface patterns and experiments with knotted glass. Jon Howell's opaque glass lampshades made in the 1960s illustrate aspects of Tüselmann's style and sensitive treatment of glass.

Jon Howell is particularly interested in the work that was produced in this period, which displays the fascination of the 1960s and 1970s with the sculptural and futuristic quality of globular forms, glass, chromium and silver leaf, but which at the same time recalls Wagenfeld's Bauhaus forms of the 1920s.
The factory closed in 1997 but, since 2007, the Peill & Putzler name has been used again for Wagenfeld lighting projects sold by the Paul Neuhaus lighting company.
Today, the company's historic works are held in several eminent museum collections, such as those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Corning Museum of Glass.