{"id":58676,"date":"2025-10-09T20:26:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T18:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hartdesignselection.com\/?p=58676"},"modified":"2026-11-01T15:14:52","modified_gmt":"2026-11-01T14:14:52","slug":"marcel-breuer-from-the-wassily-chair-to-modern-democratic-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hartdesignselection.com\/en\/marcel-breuer-from-the-wassily-chair-to-modern-democratic-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Marcel Breuer: from the Wassily chair to Modern Democratic Design"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Dessau, 1925. A young carpentry master at the Bauhaus<\/a> rides his new Adler bicycle through town and keeps looking down at the handlebars. If a factory could bend steel tube that lightly and that strongly, why not a chair? Within months, Marcel Breuer<\/strong> (1902-1981) had built one of the first pieces of furniture in bent tubular steel, the chair the world now knows as the Wassily<\/strong>. He was twenty-three.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For anyone who loves interiors, Breuer matters twice over. His tubular steel chairs, the Wassily and the Cesca above all, invented a new family of furniture and remain in production almost a century later. And the same man went on to become one of the great architects of the post-war years, from the Whitney Museum in New York to the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and the ski resort of Flaine in the French Alps. Few designers have moved so convincingly from the armchair to the building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From P\u00e9cs to the Bauhaus<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Marcel Lajos Breuer was born on 21 May 1902 in P\u00e9cs, in southern Hungary. At eighteen he left for Vienna to study art, stayed only a few weeks, and in 1920 joined the Bauhaus in Weimar, the school founded the year before by Walter Gropius<\/strong>. He entered the carpentry workshop, where his talent quickly stood out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His early pieces, such as the slatted wooden armchair of 1922, show the influence of the Dutch De Stijl<\/a> movement and Gerrit Rietveld: planes and lines assembled like a composition, with the sitter almost an afterthought. When the school moved to Dessau in 1925, Gropius appointed him head of the furniture workshop. He was one of the first former students to become a Bauhaus master, alongside teachers such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Moholy-Nagy.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Portrait
Marcel Breuer, designer of the Wassily and Cesca chairs and architect of the Whitney Museum.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The bicycle and the tube: the Wassily chair (1925-1926)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The chair first known as model B3<\/strong> takes the bulky club chair of the nineteenth century and reduces it to a drawing in space. A frame of bent, nickel-plated and later chromed steel tube<\/strong> carries taut bands of fabric, then leather, for the seat, back and arms. The early versions used Eisengarn, a waxed cotton canvas woven at the Bauhaus; leather came later. The frame was bolted rather than welded, so the chair could be taken apart and shipped flat, a very industrial idea for 1925.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kandinsky admired the piece, and Breuer made one for the painter’s house in Dessau. The name came much later: when the Italian manufacturer Dino Gavina reissued the chair in the early 1960s, he called it “Wassily” in tribute to the painter. Before Gavina, it had been produced by Standard-M\u00f6bel, a small Berlin firm Breuer co-founded, then by Thonet. Since Knoll took over Gavina in 1968, Knoll has been its authorised maker.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Wassily
The Wassily chair, designed in 1925-1926 and produced today by Knoll.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n \n \n
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