Iconic Furniture

Lead Summary

Furniture design is one of the rare disciplines where a single object can crystallize an entire ideological program. The chairs, stools, and tables surveyed here span nearly 170 years, yet each shares a quality that transcends period style: each solved a problem — of material, manufacture, comfort, or culture — with a clarity that made subsequent iterations feel redundant. From Michael Thonet's steam-bent beechwood chair assembled from six pieces and ten screws, to the single-shell polypropylene Panton Chair, these designs collectively map the transitions of modern manufacturing, the migration of design culture across continents, and the recurring erasure and recovery of women and non-Western designers in the historical record.

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Historical Development

The First Mass-Produced Object: Thonet No. 14 (1859)

Before there was modern design, there was Thonet. Michael Thonet's Model No. 14 — introduced in 1859 — is routinely cited as the world's first mass-produced piece of furniture, and the prototype for all serialized design that followed. The chair's genius was structural: six pieces of steam-bent beechwood, ten screws, and two nuts. Each component was heated to approximately 100°C, pressed into cast-iron moulds under steam, and then dried at 70°C for 20 hours — a process that made wood pliable along its grain without adhesive or cracking.

The commercial logic was equally rigorous. Thirty-six disassembled chairs could be packed into one cubic meter, transforming intercontinental distribution from fantasy to fact. By 1912, Gebrüder Thonet was producing up to 1.8 million pieces annually. By 1930, more than 50 million No. 14 chairs had been sold worldwide, appearing in cafés from Vienna to Buenos Aires.

Le Corbusier described the humble Thonet chair as possessing "nobility" precisely because millions of them existed — presenting democratic accessibility as a modernist virtue.

The chair achieved institutional recognition at the 1867 World Exposition in Paris, winning a gold medal only eight years after its introduction. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret later furnished the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau (1925) with Thonet model No. 209, explicitly justifying the choice in ideological terms: mass production and democratic accessibility were, for him, modernist virtues. That endorsement cemented Thonet bentwood furniture within the Western modernist canon.

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Tubular Steel and the Bauhaus Moment (1925–1930)

The Bauhaus school (1919–1933) brought designers, engineers, and artists into a single workshop. When it closed under Nazi pressure in April 1933, its faculty scattered across Europe and America — and the design ideas seeded there took root in new soil.

The Wassily Chair (1925–1926)

Marcel Breuer, then head of the cabinet-making workshop (Möbelwerkstatt) at the Bauhaus in Dessau, purchased an Adler bicycle in 1925 and was struck by the structural logic of its bent steel handlebars — light, strong, cantilevered. He applied the same principle to furniture, designing what would become Model B3 using seamless steel tubing produced through the Mannesmann process, patented in 1886.

The resulting chair dematerialized seating: Eisengarn fabric straps (strong, waxed-cotton thread) were pulled taut between the steel frame, eliminating solid mass in favor of structural line. The name "Wassily" was applied retroactively in the 1960s by Italian manufacturer Gavina, after discovering that Wassily Kandinsky — then also at the Bauhaus — had admired and received one for his apartment. The B3 is widely cited as the first chair to use a bent tubular steel frame as its primary structural element.

The Cesca Chair / B32 (1928)

Two years later, Breuer designed the B32, applying the cantilever principle to a new form. The frame of continuous bent tubular steel — inspired, again, by bicycle construction — was combined with a beech wood frame hand-caned with rattan, pairing industrial cold-processing with pre-industrial craft. MoMA curators have called the Cesca one of the ten most important chairs of the twentieth century. When Gavina reissued it in the 1960s, the company renamed it "Cesca" after Breuer's adopted daughter Francesca. Knoll acquired the Gavina Group in 1968 and has produced it under license since.

The Barcelona Chair (1929)

For the German Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition — a building designed as a modernist manifesto without separate exhibits, relying on rare materials and furniture alone to express ideology — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich designed what would become the Barcelona Chair. The piece provided ceremonial seating for Spanish royalty during the inauguration. Its X-frame structure invoked the Roman sella curulis (curule chair), a seat of magisterial authority, translating classical power into modernist form.

The Barcelona Chair underwent a significant technical revision in 1950, when the original bolted-together construction was replaced by a seamless stainless steel frame. Mies licensed production rights to Knoll in 1953; each Knoll example is nearly entirely handcrafted, with 40 individual leather panels cut, hand-welted, and hand-tufted from a single cowhide, and carries a facsimile of Mies's signature on the frame. The chair is held in the permanent collection of MoMA.

The Brno Chair (1929–1930)

Designed by Mies and Reich for the Tugendhat House in Brno, Czechoslovakia (a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001), the Brno Chair distills the cantilever principle to its leanest expression: a single bent strap of steel U-shaped in profile, supporting a taut leather seat and back with no rear legs. The development occurred in explicit dialogue with contemporaries Mart Stam (who pioneered the cantilever approach in 1925–1927) and Marcel Breuer. Knoll reintroduced the chair in 1958 for Philip Johnson's Four Seasons Restaurant in New York, manufacturing it in two variants — flat-bar and tubular steel — according to the original specifications in collaboration with the Mies van der Rohe Archives at MoMA.

The LC4 Chaise Longue (1928)

Designed in 1928 in Le Corbusier's atelier and first exhibited at the 1929 Salon d'Automne as part of the équipement intérieur d'une habitation (interior equipment of a dwelling) installation, the LC4 was conceived as a "machine for relaxation" (la machine à détente). The chaise's tubular steel frame and adjustable slide mechanism allowed continuous reclining without discrete locking positions — a functional-mechanical approach to bodily comfort that embodied Le Corbusier's philosophy of furniture as artificial limb.

For decades, the piece was attributed primarily to Le Corbusier. Contemporary scholarship and Cassina's archival reattribution have firmly established Charlotte Perriand as the principal designer — the one who conceived the initial ergonomic form, supervised the construction of the first prototype with a metalworking specialist, and paid close attention to technical construction. The 2019–2020 Fondation Louis Vuitton retrospective on Perriand was a landmark moment in this historiographical recovery.

Cassina acquired production rights through a license signed with the designers' heirs and the Fondation Le Corbusier on 23 October 1964. Each piece in the "Cassina I Maestri" collection bears a production number and an identity card certifying authenticity.

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Finnish Modernism: Wood as Humanism (1932–1935)

While the Bauhaus explored steel, Alvar Aalto was working with Finnish birch. His material philosophy was explicit: the cold, hard surfaces of tubular-steel furniture were, in his view, psychologically inappropriate — particularly in hospitals.

The Paimio Chair (1932)

Designed for the Paimio Sanatorium, the Paimio Chair (Model 41) is constructed from a continuous bent-birch loop supporting a single sheet of moulded birch plywood for seat and back. The material choice required collaboration with furniture manufacturer Otto Korhonen, whose factory developed the industrial bending techniques necessary for production. The result established bent-birch plywood as a modernist language distinct from the Bauhaus tradition — a founding work of Scandinavian modernism rooted in local biomaterials and humanistic values.

The Stool 60 (1932–1933)

Aalto's L-leg — patented with Korhonen in Scandinavia and Britain in the early 1930s — solved the problem of how to bend wood at a right angle without traditional joinery. Thin saw-cuts along the grain of birch were filled with veneer sheets and steam-bent in a single continuous piece. Aalto conceptualized the L-leg as a "type solution" in wood, analogous to the Doric column: a reusable structural archetype that could generate more than 50 distinct products between 1933 and 1956 through systematic recombination.

The Stool 60 was first publicly shown in November 1933 at the "Wood Only" exhibition at Fortnum & Mason in London. Artek, the company Aalto co-founded in December 1935 with his wife Aino, visual arts promoter Maire Gullichsen, and art historian Nils-Gustav Hahl, has kept it in continuous production since — making it one of the longest-running furniture designs in history. The stool is held in MoMA, the V&A, the Vitra Design Museum, and the Design Museum Helsinki.

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American Postwar Modernism: Plywood, Fiberglass, and Television (1946–1958)

The United States after 1945 offered designers something Europe lacked: an industrial base retooled from wartime production, a vast suburban market, and institutional platforms — primarily MoMA and the Cranbrook Academy — that translated design discourse into consumer aspiration.

The Eames LCW (1946)

Charles and Ray Eames developed their compound-curve plywood-molding technique through a wartime commission: the U.S. Navy needed leg splints, and between 1942 and 1945, the Eameses produced approximately 150,000 of them through the Evans Products Company. That production experience — and the "Kazam!" hydraulic press they built, which used inflatable rubber balloons as the male form to press veneer against curved moulds — translated directly into civilian furniture.

The LCW (Lounge Chair Wood) debuted at MoMA's "New Furniture Designed by Charles Eames" exhibition in March 1946. Its key technical feature — separate molded plywood panels joined by a plywood spine and rubber shock mounts borrowed from industrial machinery — solved the cracking problem encountered in single-shell designs. Herman Miller acquired rights by 1949 and has kept the chair in production since.

Ray Eames' essential contributions were systematically undercredited in period press: the 1946 exhibition title named only Charles, and the 1956 Today Show appearance introduced Ray as someone who "helps Charles." This attribution pattern was not corrected in design literature until decades later.

The Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman (1956)

Debuted on the Arlene Francis Home Show on NBC in 1956, the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman (Model 670/671) represents a different register: luxury. Three molded rosewood-veneer plywood shells — headrest, backrest, seat — joined by aluminum spiders and upholstered with leather cushions originally filled with Scottish "Best Auch" leather and goose down (later replaced with synthetic fill). Manufactured in Zeeland, Michigan by Herman Miller without interruption since 1956, it is one of the longest continuously produced modernist furniture designs in existence. MoMA curator Arthur Drexler organized a major retrospective in 1973 and praised it as uniquely surpassing English club chairs in comfort. Between 1941 and 1959, MoMA featured the Eames Office's work in twenty-four separate exhibitions.

The Womb Chair (1948)

Florence Knoll commissioned Eero Saarinen with a precise brief: a chair "like a basket full of pillows, something I could really curl up in." Saarinen's response, designed in 1946 and released in 1948 as Model No. 70, required a material that plywood could not provide — fiberglass-reinforced polyester resin, borrowed from naval shipbuilding. The Womb Chair was one of the earliest commercial chairs to use fiberglass as a load-bearing structural shell.

Saarinen described the chair's philosophical basis as the theory that "a great number of people have never really felt comfortable and secure since they left the womb." The design marked a shift from Bauhaus rectilinear geometry toward biomorphic organic forms — a postwar trajectory whose technological foundation (fiberglass shell) Saarinen would extend into his Pedestal Collection a decade later. The Womb Chair has been a Knoll bestseller for over 75 years; the company formally commemorated its 75th anniversary in 2023.

The Tulip Chair (1955–1956)

Saarinen's Pedestal Collection — which he called a solution to the "slum of legs" cluttering modernist interiors — comprised chairs, armchairs, tables, coffee tables, and stools unified by a single-pedestal base. The Tulip Chair's seat is molded fiberglass-reinforced polyester; the base is cast aluminum coated with rilsan. The unified appearance conceals a material compromise: 1950s fiberglass could not support a truly one-piece structure, as prototypes broke at the junction. Saarinen was awarded a U.S. patent for the design in 1960. Knoll continues to manufacture the Pedestal Collection to the present day.

The Eames Molded Plastic Chair (1950)

The Eames Molded Plastic Chair — winner of second prize at MoMA's 1948 International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design — was the first commercially successful mass-produced plastic chair. The fiberglass-reinforced polyester shell was adapted from military technology: Zenith Plastics had used the material for aircraft radar domes. A production partnership between Zenith Plastics and Herman Miller was formalized on 4 November 1949; mass production began in 1950 at Zenith's Gardena, California facility, with the Eameses supervising color development by experimenting with pigment combinations on site.

The design's modular logic — one shell, interchangeable bases (wire Eiffel tower, wood dowel, tubular steel, rocker, stacking) — created a systematic nomenclature (DSW, DSR, DAR, RAR, DSS) encoding height, seat type, and base material, pioneering a platform approach to furniture design. Original fiberglass production continued through 1989, when Herman Miller discontinued it on environmental grounds at the request of the widowed Ray Eames. The design was reintroduced in recyclable polypropylene in 2001.

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Scandinavian Organicism: Total Design and the Hotel Interior (1958)

The Egg Chair and Swan Chair (1958)

Arne Jacobsen operated under a philosophy of Gesamtkunstwerk — total, unified design. When commissioned for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen (opened 1 July 1960), he designed the architecture, interiors, furniture, cutlery, and fittings as a single coordinated whole.

The Egg Chair was developed through an iterative clay-modeling process in Jacobsen's garage, building and refining prototypes to discover the ideal shell shape — a sculptural process comparable to traditional sculpture rather than industrial specification. The fiberglass-and-foam shell is entirely hand-upholstered (over 1,300 hand-stitches per chair); Fritz Hansen produces only six to seven chairs per week as a result. The Egg sits on a four-star satin-polished aluminum base with a 360-degree swivel. It is held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's permanent collection.

The Swan Chair was designed as the Egg's companion: where the Egg encloses the sitter in private retreat, the Swan's wing-like projections open outward, creating a more sociable presence. Both have been manufactured continuously by Fritz Hansen since 1958.

The Panton Chair (1967)

Verner Panton spent years attempting to realize a single-material, single-shell chair — a design he had sketched as early as 1955. The first production version, launched in 1967 in collaboration with Vitra, used cold-pressed glass-fiber-reinforced polyester; subsequent versions cycled through Baydur polyurethane foam (1968), injection-molded thermoplastic (1975–1979, discontinued due to poor aging), and rigid polyurethane foam (1990). The definitive version — injection-molded polypropylene (1999) — produces approximately 20 chairs per hour.

The chair became an emblem of Pop Art optimism: its bold S-curve, vibrant color palette, and one-piece plastic construction embodied a utopian belief that cheap manufactured polymers could deliver structural and aesthetic innovation simultaneously. When unveiled in the Danish journal Mobilia in August 1967, it generated immediate cultural attention; it later appeared on a 1995 Kate Moss Vogue cover and is held in the permanent collections of MoMA, the V&A, and the Vitra Design Museum.

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Japanese Modernism: Folk Craft Meets Industry (1954)

The Butterfly Stool (1954)

Sori Yanagi (1915–2011) — eldest son of Sōetsu Yanagi, founder of the Mingei (folk craft) movement — designed the Butterfly Stool in 1954, adapting the compound-curve plywood molding technique pioneered by the Eameses into a distinctly Japanese formal register. Two identical molded plywood pieces join at a single brass rod beneath the seat and a brass stretcher near the floor; the silhouette simultaneously evokes butterfly wings and the torii gate portal of Shinto shrines.

Sori Yanagi adapted Mingei's principle — that beauty arises from fitness for purpose rather than decorative intent — to industrial mass production. The stool was first manufactured by Tendo Mokko beginning in 1956 and won the Gold Medal at the Milan Triennale in 1957. It has been in continuous production since and is recognized as one of the most cited non-Western designs in the postwar design canon.

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Japanese Storage: Tansu (Edo Period–Present)

Tansu

Tansu — the Japanese term for freestanding storage furniture — first emerged as a documented furniture form during the Genroku era (1688–1704) of the Edo period, developing in response to prolonged peace, economic growth, and the rise of a merchant class. Historical records reference wheeled storage chests during the Great Fire of Meireki in 1657, suggesting mobile storage solutions predate even the Genroku formalization.

Tansu design was strictly regulated by class. The Kansei Reforms of 1789 explicitly designated chest-on-chest tansu as acceptable for the merchant class — sumptuary regulations governing material culture extended to furniture. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868 dissolved Edo-period class structures, regional typologies flourished: Sendai tansu feature bold keyaki construction with elaborate ironwork; Kyoto isho-dansu are known for lacquering; Niigata specialized in paulownia (kiri) tansu due to regional climate.

The choice of paulownia for isho-dansu (kimono storage chests) was technically precise: paulownia expands in high humidity to create an airtight seal protecting textiles, then contracts in drier conditions to allow air circulation — a humidity-management mechanism developed through centuries of empirical observation. Specialized typologies include kuruma-dansu (wheeled chests engineered for rapid fire evacuation in Edo's wooden urban fabric) and funa-dansu (sea-merchant chests built to survive salt air, water exposure, and ocean travel aboard bezaisen coastal vessels).

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Brazilian Modernism: Tropical Wood and National Identity (1940s–1960s)

Brazil's mid-century furniture designers worked simultaneously with Euro-American modernism but diverged in two decisive ways: they used expensive native tropical hardwoods (jacaranda, imbuia, peroba) instead of industrial plastics, and they relied on handcraft production partly because mass-manufacturing infrastructure was not in place. The result is a body of work that remains unmistakably Brazilian and difficult to replicate with substitute materials.

Joaquim Tenreiro and the Three-Foot Chair (1947)

Joaquim Tenreiro (1906–1992), a Portuguese-born cabinetmaker who emigrated to Rio de Janeiro in the late 1920s, is recognized as the founding figure of modern Brazilian furniture design. His Three-Foot Chair (Cadeira de Três Pés), designed in 1947, employed a stack-lamination technique bonding up to five native hardwoods — imbuia, jacarandá, roxinho, cabreúva, ivorywood — into a striped chromatic effect that associated geometry with color. The caned seat was a functional climate adaptation: caning allows air circulation, reducing moisture in humid tropical conditions. Tenreiro collaborated extensively with Oscar Niemeyer, designing furniture for Niemeyer's architectural projects. He closed his workshops in 1967–1969 to devote himself to painting and sculpture.

Sergio Rodrigues and the Mole Armchair (1957)

Sergio Rodrigues designed the Poltrona Mole (Mole Armchair) in 1957 for Rio de Janeiro photographer Otto Stupakoff, who requested "a spread-out, generous sofa." The design — a solid jacaranda rosewood frame suspending oversized leather cushions on adjustable leather straps — deliberately rejects the spare lines of European modernism in favor of languid, generous form. Rodrigues described the design philosophy as wanting to "speak Brazilian." The Mole won first prize at the IV Concorso Internazionale del Mobile in Cantù, Italy in 1961 (438 submissions from 27 countries); Arne Jacobsen, present at the competition, recognized it as communicating the unique characteristics of Brazilian culture.

Rodrigues founded OCA in 1955 — a Rio de Janeiro showroom combining retail and gallery functions, named for the indigenous Brazilian cabin form — where the Mole initially attracted little local attention until manufactured in Italy for European distribution.

Lina Bo Bardi and the Bowl Chair (1951)

Lina Bo Bardi (Rome, 1914 – São Paulo, 1992) moved to Brazil in 1947 after marrying art critic Pietro Maria Bardi, arriving to help establish the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). She designed the Bowl Chair in 1951: a hemispherical leather-upholstered bowl rotating and tilting freely inside a slim chrome-plated steel cradle, allowing the sitter to re-orient the bowl into any posture. The chair was never industrially produced during her lifetime; Arper manufactured it in 2013 as a 500-piece limited edition in collaboration with the Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi.

Bo Bardi's career was historically marginalized in Northern-hemisphere design histories on combined grounds of nationality and gender. She posthumously received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale — the first woman so honored for architecture at that event.

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Latin American Modernism: The Butaque and Clara Porset (1945–1957)

Clara Porset's Butaque

Clara Porset (Matanzas, Cuba 1895 – 1981) spent her career in Mexico, where she became the primary woman designer working with the country's leading modernist architects — principally Luis Barragán and Mario Pani. Her butaque was an explicit theoretical argument: that modern Mexican design need not import European modernist forms, but that vernacular pieces, re-proportioned according to modernist principles of fitness for purpose and material economy, could authentically carry modernist values. The butaque — a low, deeply reclined seat with woven or solid seat material between curved sled-like wooden rails — translated an indigenous pre-modern form into a modernist vocabulary without abandoning its origins.

Porset championed a design philosophy that rejected the binary between handcraft and industrial production: "There is design in everything." She was featured in MoMA's "Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1940–1980" in 2024.

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Chandigarh: Postcolonial Design and Heritage Conflict

The Chandigarh Furniture Program (1951–1965)

Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier's cousin, served as Chief Architect of Chandigarh from 1951 to 1965, overseeing the design and production of more than 50,000 pieces of furniture for India's new planned capital. These pieces were manufactured in Chandigarh's government workshops — not European factories — using locally-sourced materials: Burmese teak, Indian rosewood (sissoo), and cane woven by Punjabi craftspeople. Jeanneret's drawings were deliberately adaptable, designed to be interpreted, adjusted, and executed using local tools, timber dimensions, and traditional joinery.

Attribution often conflates the two cousins, elevating Le Corbusier's role — who designed the three main Capitol Complex buildings and specific high-court furniture — while marginalizing Jeanneret's contributions and those of Indian collaborators. Urmila Eulie Chowdhury — India's first qualified woman architect — managed furniture production, adapted Jeanneret's designs to smaller scales suitable for Indian physiques, and created affordable modular variants. Despite her "extremely important" role, confirmed by design historians, she remains largely uncredited in catalogue entries.

In 2016, UNESCO inscribed Chandigarh's Capitol Complex as a World Heritage Site; the inscription explicitly encompassed furniture, luminaries, bas-reliefs, and interior decorative elements.

In 1999, Parisian dealer Eric Touchaleaume made his first prospecting trip to Chandigarh, buying Jeanneret pieces from government warehouses and junkyards. Over the following eight years he made more than 30 trips, refurbishing pieces in France and selling them at Western auction houses.

The resulting trade prompted crisis: in 2007, Rajnish Wattas established the Chandigarh Heritage Furniture Committee in response to large-scale export, tasked with archiving remaining stocks. City authorities subsequently ordered a halt to furniture auctions.

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The Noguchi Coffee Table (1944)

Isamu Noguchi designed the IN-50 coffee table in 1944, evolving from a 1939 table created for MoMA president A. Conger Goodyear. The table entered Herman Miller production in 1947. Its biomorphic wooden base — two interlocking curved pieces originally in walnut — directly translates Noguchi's sculptural practice into structural furniture: he approached functional objects as extensions of his sculpture, dissolving the boundary between fine art and applied design. Production ceased in 1973 and was reintroduced in 1984; Herman Miller manufactures for the US market, Vitra for Europe, both under license from the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum.

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Controversies & Debates

Attribution and Gender Erasure

A recurring pattern in this history is the systematic erasure of women designers' contributions. Charlotte Perriand's role in the LC4 was minimized for decades; Ray Eames' co-authorship of the LCW and Lounge Chair was rendered invisible in period press and institutional documentation; Lilly Reich's co-design of the Barcelona and Brno chairs was subordinated to Mies van der Rohe; Eulie Chowdhury's management of the Chandigarh program remains largely uncredited; Lina Bo Bardi was marginalised in Northern-hemisphere design discourse for most of her career.

The reattributions have accelerated since the 1990s — through MoMA exhibitions, archival research, and institutional gestures like the 2018 Lilly Reich Grant for Equality in Architecture — but recovery remains incomplete and uneven.

Counterfeits and Intellectual Property

The commercial success of iconic furniture has generated persistent counterfeit markets. The Noguchi Foundation holds trademark on the IN-50's configuration; US Customs and Border Protection seized 42 shipments of counterfeit furniture in fiscal year 2016 alone, valued at $4.2 million, including knockoffs of the Noguchi table and the Barcelona Chair. Authentic Noguchi tables bear the designer's signature at specific locations. The Chandigarh furniture market represents a different dimension of authenticity conflict: original government-owned pieces sold into Western collector markets, raising questions of cultural heritage and rightful ownership.

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Legacy

The furniture surveyed here shares a paradox: each piece was designed as a solution to a specific problem — the portability of Thonet, the structural logic of Breuer, the climate-appropriateness of Tenreiro — yet each transcended its origin to become a cultural monument, reproduced, counterfeited, collected, and canonized. That canonization has costs: it elevates selected objects and attributed designers while obscuring the collaborative, cross-cultural, and often gendered labor that produced them.

The more durable legacy may be methodological. The Eameses demonstrated that rigorous problem-solving and mass production were compatible with aesthetic sophistication. Aalto established that organic form and humanistic material choices were not retreats from modernism but an alternative trajectory within it. Sori Yanagi proved that industrial manufacturing and folk-craft philosophy were not opposites. The Chandigarh program showed that "design" could mean something made in government workshops by local carpenters adapting drawings to hand tools and available timber — and that such objects could achieve UNESCO heritage status.