Combine a wheel frame , a leather gild chairman , and a genius , and you get a design gyration .
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Wassily Chair is that it was designed in 1925 when the Ford Model A was consider write out - edge engineering science . Nearly a century later , the Wassily Chair still looks as contemporary as when it first give the mess market .
With an elegant form traced in gleaming steel , a back and arms that seem to drift in blank , and its ability to reserve somebody on its canvas bum without touching the metal framework , the Wassily Chair looks like something out of the Information Age rather than the Jazz Age .
Marcel Breuer seated in a Wassily Chair.Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
Some people remember the Wassily Chair come out of themid-20th hundred ’s era of Modernismsince that ’s when it was mass - produced and spread to the American suburban area . But its origin story begins nearly two generations earlier , across the Atlantic in pre - World War II Germany , where a bunch of architect and clothes designer place out to turn the world into an trickily design utopia .
Here ’s the backstory on the Wassily , the extremely sculptural , minimal president that forever changed the course of article of furniture design .
Bauhaus Beginnings
The Wassily Chair was designed by Hungarian architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer , an apprentice at theBauhaus . Founded in 1919 , this influential German schooltime of modern art , computer architecture , and intention defend that form should follow social occasion .
Bauhaus father Walter Gropiusbelieved creative person and decorator could create beautiful , utile objective that could be mass - acquire to make the earthly concern a better place . Too much ornamentation entail an detail could n’t be affordably made en masse , so Gropius and his acolytes championed minimalist forms and originative use of materials like sword , methamphetamine , and steam - crumpled wood .
Dr. Anna Ruth Gatlin, assistant professor at Auburn University
It reave a classic chairwoman down to its core as a festivity of what ’s great about engineering , materials , conception … It ’s bright and energetic ; the pith of contemporaneity .
Breuer want to make a tubelike steel rendering of the traditional overstuff leather club chair that was in every gin joint from Detroit to Paris at the time . Talk about opposites . But put a steel bicycle underframe and an overstuffed leather night club chair through the optical prism of Breuer ’s genius , and you get the Wassily Chair , an only different creation .
" Where aclub chairis oversized , soft , comfortable , and so solid it ground a way , the Wassily Chair is tiny , specially in perceived scale , since it has so much negative outer space , " says Dr. Anna Ruth Gatlin , an adjunct professor at Auburn University who teach a two - part course in the history of inner design . " The Wassily is not soft and comfy . Its seat and back are leather straps . It ’s have good ergonomics , so it ’s easy , but you do n’t want to curl up in it in front of a fervency with a record . This is a chairwoman with no fluff . "
Credit: Santi Caleca / Courtesy of Knoll
Compared to the flowery , heavy wooden furniture that preceded it , the Wassily was nothing short of a revolution .
Breuer holler his creation Club Chair model B3 . The chair was knight the " Wassily " after painterWassily Kandinsky , a Bauhaus instructor , praise the design and asked Breuer to make one for his studio .
The Wassily Chair’s Journey to the Masses
Before Breuer could get his Wassily Chair to the American masses , though , chronicle have in the way . nazi push the blockage of the Bauhaus in 1933 , deriding the work of artists like Bauhaus teachers Paul Klee and Kandinsky and decrying the school as a breeding ground for " cultural Bolshevism . "
Many Bauhaus bigwigs flee for their lives , emigrating to the United States where their study and doctrine mold generation of architects and designers . Breuer and Gropius taught at Harvard , and Breuerdesigned the Whitney , a Modernist icon in Manhattan that houses the world ’s preeminent collection of 20th - century American art and design .
" American modernism come straight from the Bauhaus , " Dr. Gatlin says . " It was a ball of fire of modern culture and we experience its influences to this daylight . "
Credit: Courtesy of Knoll
But because of World War II , you do n’t see Bauhaus contemporaneousness make it into mainstream U.S. menage interior decoration until the late forties and fifties . That ’s when U.S. factories begin making consumer goods again or else of bullets and cooler .
Knoll has been mass - give rise Wassily Chairs since the 1960s , so you’re able to still find them in wait way and living rooms across the land . Wassily Chairs were never especially low-cost , despite all the utopian design and despite the mass production . Expect to discover the chairs for about$3,000 for leather seatsand$2,800 for canvas tail .
Breuer died in 1981 , but the Wassily Chair remains one of Modernism ’s mosticonic chairs . " It strip a classical chair down to its core as a celebration of what ’s cracking about engineering science , materials , design , " Dr. Gatlin says . " It ’s hopeful and industrious , the essence of contemporaneity . "
