VERY modern chair designs 1920-32! Bauhaus (Germany) and Aalto (Finland)

Depending on your perspective, the Bau­haus Movement (1919-1933) either gave birth to, or nourished modern design, a de­sign style recognised by its clean, simple lines and truth to mater­ials.         

     

Le Corbusier LC3, 1928

                             

Architect and designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a well known exponent of International Style modernism. His refined philos­ophy had become a catch phrase throughout C20th design. Mies van der Rohe's early architectural career in Berlin included train­ing in Bruno Paul’s office in 1905-7 and in Peter Behrens’ office in 1908-11 (with co-workers Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius). He open­ed his own pract­ice in Berlin in 1913 and developed arch­it­ecture that used the pure formalism of the International Style.

Bauhaus Academy opened in 1919, and soon had a popular furniture work­shop; it creat­­ed objects that borr­owed from the designs of their pred­ec­es­s­ors. How­ever they had more front-line materials and their production techniques were improved. Their furniture was made from ply­wood forms, glass slabs, steel tub­ing and geo­m­etric shap­es, increasing the influence of Bau­haus and spreading it out from Germany.

The Chair with Colourful Woven Seat (1921) was designed by Marcel Breuer and Gunta Stölzl. Though built of wood and quite tradit­ional in form, the woven seat and back showed the infl­uence of De Stijl's bold primary-colours.

Under Marcel Breuer’s leadership from 1924-8, the workshop re-­th­ought the crux of furniture, often seeking to reduce con­ventional forms to their min­imal state. Here are the classic chairs of the Bauhaus movement in his era:

From 1926-32 Mies van der Rohe was vice president of the Deutsche Werkbund, designers and architects whose main aim was the development of well-designed, mass-producible architecture and home objects via an alliance of art and industry. In 1927 the Werk­­­bund presented an exhib­ition that incl­uded the Weissenhof Housing Estate, ex­p­eri­men­tal blocks of flats in Stuttgart, designed by Le Corbusier.

Under Mies van der Rohe's direction, some young architects who collabor­ated on the project designed furniture for the flats. A graceful, elegant and well proportioned MR chair, developed from a 1924 design for a cantilevered chair by Mart Stam, was int­ro­duced by Mies van der Rohe at the 1927 Stuttgart Exhibition. Note the tubular steel and cane seat, and note the armless design.

Mies van der Rohe, MR chair, 1927

The Model B3 Chair was designed by Mar­cel Breuer (1925) while he was the head of the cabinet-making workshop at Bau­haus, Dessau. Ins­p­ired by the sleek body of Breuer’s bicycle, the Mod­el B3 featured a steel tubular structure finished in bright chrome, while the seat and back were covered by strong leather strips. Note the chair was not designed for the non-objective painter Was­sily Kand­in­s­ky who was also on Bauhaus’ staff. Kan­dinsky had simply ad­mir­ed the final design, so Breuer built a copy for his friend's rooms. Inspir­ed, Breuer continued to exp­eriment with metal furniture, ultimately creating lightweight, mass-producible chairs, some used in the Dessau building theatre.

The foldable design of another Breuer chair, the D4, suc­ceeded with all audiences in 1927. Breuer’s fully ergon­omic design led it to be one of the most iconic Bauhaus furniture pieces to have hit the market then. The tubular design with the canvas seat and back ensured sturd­iness and comfort, an  innovative combin­ation.

Breuer folding D4 chair, 1927

While an architect, Le Corb­us­ier’s passion for furniture design was unparalleled. Out of all his chairs, the LC3 armchair (1928) was the most famous one. The thick design of the chair offered modularity with the cush­ions, sleek, comfortable and sophisticated.

The Barcelona Chair was designed by arch­itect Mies van der Rohe, in col­labor­at­ion with architect Lilly Reich. This Bauhaus piece whose impact continued because of the minim­alist design, chrome and black aest­hetic, created for the Barcelona Inter­national Expos­ition (1929). It featured 2 slim rectangular cushions over a light, stainless-steel frame. The chair frame was in­itially designed to be bolted together, but it was redesigned using stainless steel, allowing it to be formed from a seamless piece of metal.

Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona, 1929

The Bauhaus was forced to close down in 1933 under Nazi pressure. The lecturers and students left for other countries as soon as they could, and continued to spread their philosophies and skills in the USA, UK and the rest of the world. Mies van der Rohe, last director of the Bauhaus, left Ger­many for America where he headed the Architecture Faculty at Illinois Institute of Technology.

*Now a new question (for me) is: how did Finland’s famous architect and a key figure of mid-century Modernism Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) make his int­er­national mark in furniture? How closely linked to Bauhaus was he?

Aalto studied with Josef Hoff­mann & Wiener Werkstätte, and was inspired by Eliel Saarinen and by Gebrüder Thonet. In the late 1920s and 1930s he, working closely with his designer-wife Aino Aalto, also focusing much of her energy on furniture design. His furniture designs were a natural extension of his archit­ectural thinking, using wood (mainly Fin­n­ish birch) and be­coming the first chair designer to use the cant­il­ever principle.

The Paimio Chair (1932) was named after the Paimio T.B Hospice in SW Finland. The chair was designed by Aalto to furnish the Hospice, part­icularly for sitting T.B patients. The chair was first shown to the public at an exhib­it­ion held in conjun­ction with the Nordic Build­ing Forum in Helsinki in 1932. The experim­ent­at­ion in bent ply­wood chairs, especially the Paimio chair and Mo­d­el 60 stacking stool (1933), was very sig­nific­an­t. The arm­rests and legs were made by bending thin slats of solid timb­er to shape in a mould, at first in beech. The beech was replaced by birch in 1934 so the chair could be marketed as truly Finnish.

Aalto, Paimio,1932

The Aalto spouses founded the Artek Company in 1935 in Finland, to sell Aalto pro­ducts (fur­niture, lamps and textiles) and other imported products. They became the first furn­iture designers to use the cantilever principle in chair design using wood.