Breuer’s armchair inspired by his bicycle’s handlebars

This article was originally published on Domus 1092.

“In Breuer’s furniture, we find all the elements of modern furniture in their essential and original form, which is where their great interest and value lies. These forms may one day be superseded, but they will always represent a vital contribution to the evolution of taste.” This is how critic Agnoldomenico Pica described to Domus’s readers “The character of Marcel Breuer’s work” (Domus 86, February 1935). One of the most gifted experimenters of forms and materials in industrial design, the Hungarian architect (Pécs 1902 – New York 1981) was a student and then a teacher at the Bauhaus in the Weimar Republic, alongside Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Anni Albers. In the school’s carpentry workshops in the 1920s, Breuer developed those furnishings that marked a watershed in the history of design, made of bent steel tubing and inspired by the handlebars of his bicycle. Those furnishings included the model B3, an armchair made of exposed steel tubes, with the seat, back and armrests in bands of robust Eisengarn fabric, treated with wax and paraffin, stretched and sewn between the components of the metal structure. 

A pared-down chair made of industrial materials, its gleaming low-cost tubes had unprecedented expressive potential, cutting through and illuminating the room with chromed reflections and opening up interiors to a new modernity. Dated 1958, the archive drawing of the tubular chair, made in his New York studio on 57th Street, tells the story of Breuer’s transatlantic migration – having fled Germany and then Europe with the rise of Nazism, like many of his colleagues. The drawing also recounts the interest of Dino Gavina, a shrewd Bolognese entrepreneur, in stubbornly putting the armchair conceived in the Bauhaus years back into production.

Pencilled on the paper are the dimensions, thicknesses and welding points of the steel, and the way the bands of fabric are sewn and held together with screws and bolts. In the Gavina catalogue, the armchair was named Wassily in honour of Kandinsky, the Bauhaus master and colleague who purchased one of the first examples of the chair for his studio. The success was immediate, and even when the Knoll group acquired the Italian Gavina company in 1968, Breuer’s chairs were preserved, produced and appreciated to the point of becoming one of Knoll’s most distinctive products. As Pica wrote in Domus, Breuer’s essential and versatile folded steel furniture broke new ground and gave a “fresh look to modern life”. This year the structure is also being offered in the colours white, onyx and dark red, with which the company is celebrating some historic Bauhaus furnishings that have always proudly been kept in its catalogue.