The Tubular-Steel Cantilevered Chair
Perhaps the most revolutionary of the new tubular-steel designs was the cantilevered chair, the chair with two legs, which was exhibited and sold for the first time in 1927.
Although Breuer has sometimes been credited with designing the first cantilevered chair, there is no doubt that the Dutch architect Mart Stam was the first to make a tubular-steel chair of cantilevered construction. At a meeting on 22 November 1926, held in preparation for the Weissenhof exhibition, Stam sketched the new chair he was working on, which was constructed from pipes and somewhat clumsy standard pipe fittings. Among those present at the meeting was Mies van der Rohe, who, inspired by the drawing, also began working on a cantilevered chair.
The chair that Stam showed at the exhibition (fig. 64) was made by the firm of L. & C. Arnold and was constructed from bent steel tubing painted black, with a seat made from canvas strips, and small round pieces of rubber attached to the base. Stam also exhibited a cantilevered lounge chair with arms (fig. 65) of similar construction, but with a leather seat and back.
Several weeks after the Stam chairs arrived at the Weissenhof exhibition, Mies unveiled his new designs for a tubular-steel side chair and armchair (fig. 66). Aside from their great elegance and sophistication, Mies's chairs surpassed Stam's in being far more springy and resilient.
According to Breuer, a further chapter should be added to the history of the cantilevered chair. By his account, he had been working on the idea of a cantilevered chair during 1926 and continued to construct his chair because he was unable to work with tubular steel of proper diameter. All of his early furniture had been made from Mannessmann tube steel approximately twenty millimeters in diameter. Breuer calculated that he would need tubing of twenty-five millimeters in order to support the weight of a person in a chair that had only two legs.
Page 70
Youth and Early Work 1902-25
Marcel Lajos Breuer was born on 22 May 1902, in Pécs, in southwestern Hungary. A city of 42,000 inhabitants, Pécs was a center of mining and industry in an essentially agricultural country. After the fall of the Hapsburgs at the end of the First World War and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it became one of five major provincial centers of the new Hungarian Republic. Throughout Breuer's childhood and youth, however, it was already the economic and cultural center of virtually all of western Hungary, a progressive and intellectual city with a university.
Page 15
De Stijl : The Style
Rietveld chair 1919
Breuer chair 1922
The art movement de stijl (1917) had a large influence on the Bauhaus and Breuer’s work. For example the Rietveld chair Red and Blue are designed similarly to a wooden Breuer chair and is painted primary colors with black as the background much like the colors associated with Bauhaus paintings etc. Here I have learned that this aesthetic is actually not from the Bauhaus but a different group of innovative artists in Europe, the Netherlands to be exact.
De Stijl literally means “the style”.
“As for Breuer; however, the de Stijl influence on his furniture is too strong and too specific to be denied. All of his known furniture from 1921 until 1925 showed the clear and unmistakable influence of de Stijl, particularly of Rietveld's furniture, which played a singularly important role in Breuer's art.”
Marcel Breuer Furniture and Interiors p.26 Wilk
“Theo van Doesburg himself, whose influence Gropius later decried but whose book the Bauhaus published in 1924, visited the school on several occasions beginning in 1921. Finally, Rietveld exhibited his furniture at the Bauhaus exhibition of 1923.”
Page 23
“Van Doesburg believed that he was personally responsible for the shift in the "creative mentality" of the students away from the earlier romantic expressionism to the rationalism of the school after 1923. "The intervention of de Stijl" he said, "brought the young artists back to order and discipline."16 When these assertions were denied by the Bauhausler, van Doesburg began to exhibit antagonistic and paranoid behavior toward the school, and toward Gropius especially.”
“Gropius and others (including Breuer) felt that van Doesburg was grossly overstating his impact on the school. They argued that tendencies "parallel" to de Stijl and other constructivist groups had developed independently at the Bauhaus. Le Corbusier's writings on primary forms were cited as a more important influence.”
Page 25
It’s worth considering how the students of Bauhaus like Breuer himself were introduced to influential artists at the time. Being at an art and design school is constantly asking of you to produce creative ideas. In an effort to influence and drive connections, institutions invite respected artists for their impressionable students. It’s no wonder Breuer and the school took on the de stijl “style”, as a former student myself being influenced by ones learning environment is what the school wants you to do, it’s certainly not viewed as copying outright because one is still in the early stages of their career and a school is meant to be a safe creative space.
“It is a neo-de Stijl construction very much related to the chairs of Gerrit Rietveld.”
“Breuer carefully differentiates between the soft spans of material that form part of the overall composition of the chair; and the hard wooden components of the elaborate structural frame. This is a characteristic that remains a constant in Breuer's chair designs, with only a very few exceptions.”
Page 26
Wilk is comparing how Rietveld’s 1917 chair influcened Breuer which I believe to be true, but now also notice a similar concept and system when comparing Rietveld’s Red and Blue chair with the Wassily chair.
Rietveld, Red and Blue 1918
Breuer, B3 Club Chair 1925
As one of the most influential chairs of the modern movement, I can’t help but find a similar idea in Rietveld’s Red and Blue chair of 1918. The angle in which both are sitting is transparent. We know by this time that Breuer was experimenting with tubular steel, but prior to this discovery his chair were with wood much like Rietveld’s. I can see how his inspiration of de stijl grew into another form supporting an entirely different idea…
Eventually Wilk acknowledges this very idea; “Like Rietveld's Red-Blue chair (fig. 8) Breuer's armchair is a somewhat awkward design. The angling of the seat and back recalls the Rietveld design” p.40
“Breuer is said to have been the first person at the Bauhaus to use readymade plywood in his furniture instead of making it himself in the traditional practice of cabinetmakers, which persisted even into the 1930s and '40s.”
Footnote for an armchair of 1922
Breuer is aware of how sterilized his chair is; “it is the least artistic, the most logical, the least "cosy" and the most mechanical” p38