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Bauhaus Chairs

The Bauhaus S 32 and S 64 chairs are classic design classics

Bauhaus chairs

Among the major influences on the development of the Bauhaus furniture tradition were without question Marcel Breuer, Mart Stam and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In context of their work as both designers and architects the trio created numerous furniture designs throughout the 1920s and 1930s which were to go on to become established, and much loved, furniture design classics. Especially popular were the chair designs and for all the cantilever chair: the unchallenged symbol of the Bauhaus era. The first cantilever chair, a chair with tubular steel frame and cantilever seat, was designed in 1926 by Mart Stam. Steel tubing was, next to plywood and sheet glass, the preferred material of the Bauhaus style - not least on account of its low cost and its ease of transporting - and the clear and cool metal quickly became a synonym for the relentless reform of furniture design during the era of classical modernism.


The cantilever chair

With the development of the Bauhaus cantilever chair in the 1920s the classic chair with its four legs was challenged and replaced by a cantilevered steel frame. An s-shaped curved base gave the necessary stability while also allowing for a smooth swinging of the chair. Although the Bauhaus students Marcel Breuer and Mart Stam were instrumental in developing this intrinsically Bauhaus design, the artistic copyright was awarded to Mart Stam for his chairs S 43 and S 43 F with armrests, works which have always been produced by Thonet.

Kragstuhl with wicker work seat

Thonet advertising for tubular steel furniture, such as the cantilever chair

The Kragstuhl

Just as with cantilever chairs Kragstühle - overhang chairs - have no hind legs; however, unlike the cantilever chair the more rigidly constructed Kragstühle frame does not move with the user, thus there is no feathering effect. The most important manufacturer of Kragstühle is the German producer Tecta whose Kragstuhl portfolio more than meets the standards of the classic Bauhaus cantilever chair. The Tecta chair designs from 1997 are formally very similar to a design by the French designer Jean Prouvé and are typically covered with a woven material.


More about 'chairs' in our journal

The Historia Supellexalis: "W" for Wegneritis

...W1, Wegneritis is a condition exclusive to furniture designers first recorded in Denmark where Jørgensen Wegner, a Hans by birth, and a leading carpenter of his age whose chairs were celebrated and acclaimed throughout all the known lands of that period, was beset by a compulsion, a creative itch, to design ever new chairs, "If only you could design just one good chair in your life", he would respond to anyone who questioned his phenomenal and relentless prolificness, for all in context of the universally agreed high-quality of his designs, "but you simply cannot", he would bewail loudly as he returned to his studio to begin the next project... The best recorded and most intensively studied expressions of Wegneritis beyond that of the Hans Jørgensen Wegner include, for example, that of the Babelsberger Eiermann by the name of Egon who over many decades sought to design "der Stuhl seines lebens", 'the chair of his life', a searching, an itch, that saw him regularly switch between materials and contexts, and a "Stuhl seines lebens" near all objective observers agree he regularly achieved, designing excellent chairs for innumerable lives; or the Grcic Konstantin who despite having realised at the start of his furniture design journey a Kite that was also a chair, and which in the opinion of many wise sages represented a near perfect definition of a chair, came closer than arguably anyone ever has come, or ever will come, to the immaterial archetype from which Plato speaks, continually produced ever new works from ever new conceptual perspectives and technical approaches...

A Chair and You at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig

...the, then, Director of the Industrial Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, reflected, not uncritically, that "as more and more new chairs become available to the buying public, the problem of selection begins to be bewildering... "1 Just one of a great many questions of chairs, seats, sitting and sitters A Chair and You at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, encourages, empowers, you to reflect upon...

Monobloc by Hauke Wendler

...According to Hauke Wendler the origins of the Monobloc project can be traced back to a photo he saw in a newspaper in February 2013; a photo from Yemen of a man walking through a forest of poorly ordered monobloc chairs in an otherwise deserted desert landscape; a photo which Wendler describes as "a beautiful photo full of questions and secrets and at the same time an incredible accumulation of plastic waste"... For all that the monobloc chair is today popularly associated with cheap, insubstantial objects2, an "accumulation of plastic waste" in the making, the (hi)story of the monobloc essentially begins, as Hauke Wendler argues, with Verner Panton's late 1950s eponymous reinforced fibreglass cantilever chair for Vitra, one of the first commercial moulded plastic chairs, before in the mid-1960s with Helmut Bätzner's BA 1171 for Wilhelm Bofinger and Vico Magistretti's Selene for Artemide, both formed from fibreglass reinforced polyester, both stackable, both formally reduced, both crafted from a minimum of material, both employing folds and curves to maximise stability, one very clearly joins the path to that which we today call the monobloc...

Chairs: Dieckmann! The Forgotten Bauhäusler Erich Dieckmann at Neuwerk 11, Halle

...If a presentation that for all the scope it has, could be a lot wider, Dieckmann's interior design, for example, comes far, far, too short: yes, the exhibition title specifies Chairs, but a great many of Dieckmann's chairs were designed for interiors, and in Dieckmann's oeuvre interior design was not only a large component, but an important component in the development of his positions to and understandings of not just seating, but relationships to furniture... Similarly his Typenmöbel, his programme furntiture12, comes far, far too short: yes, the exhibition title specifies Chairs, but his Typenmöbel programme with its reduced, rational, open form, its frugal use of material while maintaining a richness of character and the prediction of palette furniture clearly readable in many of the chairs, was, arguably, more democratic, less about furniture as being representative of status and more about utility, than others had achieved by the mid-1920s, and Typenmöbel that can thus tell us a lot about Dieckmann...

Bentwood and Beyond. Thonet and Modern Furniture Design @ the MAK – Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna

...Intertwined with the Thonet (hi)story flows a stream of wider discussions and discourses on the history of furniture design and Thonet's relationship to that history, discussions and discourses undertaken in context of theme such as, and amongst many, many others, The Mechanization of Furniture with its notes on the development of height adjustable seating and similar developments on the path to our contemporary office chairs; Furniture Made from One Single Piece and its exploration of attempts to develop, well... In addition our attention was particularly caught by the presentation of Windsor chairs which not only brings Josef Frank into the centre of the narrative but also reminds that Michael Thonet's pre-fabricated production process was but an institutionalising, and standardising, of a centuries old craft process, one elegantly encapsulated by the many craftsfolk who traditionally contributed to any given Windsor; the examples of Michael Thonet's parquet work, caught up in the fascination with Thonet chairs it can be all to easily forgotten that upon arriving in Vienna an important application, monetisation, of his newly acquired 1842 patent was for flooring not furniture, flooring that often required repeating, flowing, meandering motifs; by a 1925 reclining armchair by Margarete Schütte originating from a private commission, a work called "Canadian" but which speaks a dialect we'd place much more in the Adirondack Mountains of Vermont, which stands very much at odds with the small houses she was developing for Vienna's 1920s Siedlerbewegung, and which in its charmingly compact, chunky, reduction underscores why we should all pay more heed to her beseechment that, "I do not want to be seen only as a kitchen architect, that’s too stupid"2; and by the numerous mentions of, reference to and works by Thonet's late 19th/early 20th century competitors, not least as they help place Thonet's development following the relinquishing in 1869 of their all important 1856 patent in a more probable context, for all through the critical reflections on moments when the competitors were (arguably) more on top of the game than Thonet, reminders that Thonet were/are fallible...


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