Marcel Breuer: Innovation and the Wassily Chair

MARCEL BREUER

Innovation and the Wassily Chair

BREUER

Innovation and the Wassily Chair

James Volks & Susan Harrison

An uncomfortable monstrosity?

I was first introduced to the Bauhaus and Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair while studying history in college. For one hourlong seminar in my module “Continental Europe since 1918” we looked at the cultural blossoming of the interwar Weimar Republic. A single slide was dedicated to the Bauhaus, cataloguing its rise, successes, and abrupt conclusion. “The Nazi’s hated the Bauhaus!” I recall my lecturer exclaiming. I was intrigued.

A picture of a Wassily chair featured as an example of the school’s work. My lecturer pointed to it and proudly declared that he has one at home. I remember wondering why he had the chair, and why he felt the need to tell us. Was it because he liked the design? Or was it because he liked its connection to history? While I could not answer for him, I could for myself. I did not like the design. It looked cold, sterile, and thoroughly uncomfortable. But the history – that was somewhat endearing.

Understanding that works of design have history made me revaluate the art and design that I had previously dismissed. I found that understanding the motivation and backstory to a particular work allowed me to appreciate it in new and unexpected ways. And more often than not, the design would grow on me. That has certainly been the case with the Wassily chair.

Today, whenever I travel and have an opportunity to visit a museum of industrial design or decorative arts, I always make a pilgrimage to the furniture floors, on the hunt for pieces of design that I used to hate. Happily, I have bumped into quite a few Wassily chairs. What’s more, an unexpected encounter with one in a vintage shop has allowed me to dispel my concerns regarding comfort once and for all.

Researching, compiling, and designing this short book on Breuer and the Wassily chair has been rewarding for the same reasons. In the process, I have learnt much about the Bauhaus, Breuer, and the background to the Wassily chair. A particular highlight has been understanding the materiality of the chair in new depth. I was surprised to learn that the now ubiquitous black leather straps are not true to Breuer’s original conception. Instead, the originals featured an in-house “Eisengarn” canvas developed by Bauhaus textile student Margaretha Reichardt. Seemingly often overlooked, I have chosen to give this textile element of the Wassily chair new-found prominence, incorporating canvas into the cover, and dedicating a section to the Eisengarn material. In reading this book, I hope that you find its content just as rewarding, and that it facilitates a new understanding of Marcel Breuer and his work.

Andrew Holt 15.02.2023

Material Training

The Bauhaus obsession with materiality

The Bauhaus ambitiously sought to pioneer a radically integrated daily environment where design touched everything, from a teaspoon to a city, for the betterment of all. Key to the school’s success and enduring legacy may perhaps be found in its obsession with materiality, and its unwavering commitment to material innovation. For students, this attention to materiality began immediately upon enrolment, with the school’s now legendary preliminary course – the Vorkurs.

At the core of the preliminary training given to Bauhaus students lay Josef Albers, a former elementary-school teacher. As from autumn 1923 Albers taught the first semester of the Vorkurs, consisting of 18 lessons a week, while László MoholyNagy, colleague and artist, taught the second semester (8 lessons a week). Albers’ timetable included visits to craftsmen and factories. Without machines, and using the simplest, most conventional tools, pupils designed containers, toys and small utensils, at first using just one material and later in combinations. In this way students familiarized themselves with the inherent properties of each material and the basic rules of design.

When Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus in 1928, Albers took over the teaching of the entire Vorkurs, which he then ran until the school’s closure in 1933. Albers subsequently systematised the

Vorkurs in a completely new way, as can be seen in his approach to material studies. From 1927 onwards students were no longer permitted to work with materials at random, but instead had to progress through glass, paper and metal in strict order. They worked solely with glass in the first month and paper in the second, while in the third month they were allowed to use two materials which their studies had shown to be related. Not until the fourth month were students free to choose their own materials.

Albers observed: ‘Materials must be worked in such a way that there is no wastage: the chief principle is economy. The final form arises from the tensions of cut and folded material.’

Albers’ approach to materiality had a particular and profound influence on many students and their subsequent work. The painter Hannes Beckmann described his first lesson with Albers thus:

“I can still clearly remember my first day at the school. Josef Albers entered the room with a bundle of newspapers under one arm, which he gave out to the students. He then turned to us with roughly the following words: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are poor, not rich. We cannot afford to waste either time or materials. We must make the best out of the worst. Every work of art starts

Image: Interior of the Bauhaus building, Dessau.

from a specific material, and we must therefore first study how that material is constituted. To this end, we shall first simply experiment - without trying to produce anything. For the present we shall focus on skill, not beauty. The complexity of the form is dependent upon the material with which we are working. Bear in mind that you often achieve more by doing less. Our studies should inspire constructive thinking. Have I made myself clear? I would now like you to take the newspaper you have just been given and make something out of it which is more than it is now. I would also like you to respect the material, to employ it in a meaningful way and thereby consider its characteristic qualities. If you can do so without the aid of knives, scissors or glue, so much the better. Good luck!”. Hours later he returned, and had us lay out the results of our efforts on the floor. There were masks, boats, castles, airplanes, animals and numerous cleverly devised little figures. He dismissed it all as childish rubbish and said that a lot of it would have been better made using other materials. He then picked out one, very simple-looking piece of work by a young Hungarian architect. He had done nothing more than fold the material from top to bottom so that it stood up like a pair of wings. Josef Albers now explained how well the material had been understood, how well

it had been used and how folding was a particularly appropriate process to apply to paper since it made what was such a soft material rigid, indeed so rigid that it could be stood on its narrowest point - its edge. He also explained how a newspaper lying on a table has only one visually active side, the rest being invisible. But with the paper standing up, both sides had become visually active. The paper had thus lost its boring exterior, its tired appearance. The preliminary course was like group therapy.

By comparing all the solutions found by the other students, we quickly learned the most worthwhile way to solve a task. And we learned to criticize ourselves; that was considered more important than criticizing others. The “brainwashing” which we thus underwent in the preliminary course undoubtedly taught us to think more clearly.’

It is therefore with this understanding of materiality, from the preliminary course, that students progressed on to more specialised disciplines and workshops where they applied their learning to their chosen material in creative and innovative ways. Indeed, it is with this same respect for and interrogation of materials that head of carpentry, Marcel Breuer, and textile student, Margaretha Reichardt, redefined the material composition of the classic club chair.

Text taken and adapted from: Drost, Bauhaus.

Marcel Breuer

The innovator behind the Wassily Chair

Affectionately known to friends and family as Laijkó, Marcel Breuer was a Hungarian-American designer whose career touched nearly every aspect of three-dimensional design, from tiny utensils to the biggest buildings. Best known for his iconic chair designs, Breuer often worked in tandem with other designers, developing a thriving global practice that eventually cemented his reputation as one of the most important architects of the modern age.

Marcel Breuer was born on May 21, 1902, in Pécs, Hungary, a small town near the Danube River. After graduating from high school at the Magyar Királyi Föreáliskola in Pecs, Breuer enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna to study painting, where he had been offered a scholarship. He almost immediately disliked the program, however, and within weeks of joining, he left to begin an apprenticeship with a Viennese architect. Breuer was eager to work with his hands and joined the cabinetmaking studio of the architect’s brother. At age 18, in 1921, he moved to Weimar, Germany, to enrol at the Bauhaus. Having been founded just two years prior, the Bauhaus was young and Breuer was compelled by its mission to marry functional design with the principles of fine art. Bauhaus director Walter Gropius immediately recognized

Breuer’s talent and promoted him within a year to the head of the carpentry shop. At the Bauhaus, Breuer produced the furniture for Gropius’ Sommerfeld House in Berlin as well as his acclaimed series of “African” and “Slatted” chairs. But he also became acquainted with many of the most important artists of this era, who likewise worked and taught at the Bauhaus, including Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, and Josef Albers. Breuer later reflected that Klee served as one of his two greatest teachers in life, along with his high school geometry instructor.

In 1924, he finished his studies at the Bauhaus and briefly relocated to Paris before returning to the Bauhaus after it moved to Dessau in 1925. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Breuer supported himself largely from fees garnered from his furniture designs, most notably the widely reproduced “Wassily” chair, as his architectural commissions were few and far between at this stage in his career. In 1926, Breuer married fellow Bauhaus graduate Marta Erps. While his parents were both Jewish, Breuer was forced to officially renounce his faith in order to marry Erps, due to the anti-Semitic hostilities in Germany at the time.

In 1928, Breuer moved to Berlin, to begin his own architectural practice;

Image: Breuer seated in one of his early “Model B3” chair prototypes (the Wassily chair).

in 1934, he designed the Doldertal Apartments for the well-known Swiss architectural historian Sigfried Giedion in Zurich. Breuer moved to London in 1936, at the behest of Walter Gropius, who was concerned for his safety during the Nazi occupation. Here, he found work with Jack Pritchard of the Isokon Company, one of the earliest champions of modern design in Britain, where he designed the “Long” chair predominantly from plywood. The following year, Breuer left Europe permanently to join Gropius in teaching architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; many of their students would themselves go on to become legends in the field, such as I.M. Pei, Paul Rudolph, and Philip Johnson. From 1938 to 1941 Breuer and Gropius collaborated on various architectural projects throughout the northeastern United States, including each of the architects’ own houses as well as the Pennsylvania state exhibition at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.

Breuer finally moved to New York City in 1946, where he would work for the remainder of his life, and continued the collaborative efforts that had marked much of his career, mostly with Hamilton Smith. Over the next thirty-five years his practice expanded considerably; although he had worked mostly on small-scale domestic structures before the war, Breuer increasingly took on larger and more diverse institutional projects. He sought and regularly received internationallyrenowned commissions, including the Sarah Lawrence College Theatre in Bronxville, New York (1952); St. John’s Abbey and University, Collegeville, Minnesota (1953-61); the De Bijenkorf department store, Rotterdam (1955-57); the headquarters for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Washington, D.C. (1963-68); and the Atlanta Central Library (1969-80). He retired in 1976, the same year that he was awarded the Grande Medaille d’Or by the French Academie of Architecture.

Text and quote taken and adapted from: Coyote, “Marcel Breuer”, The Art Story

“Always the innovator, Breuer was eager to both test the newest advances in technology and to break with conventional forms, often with startling results.”

The Wassily Chair

A revolution in modern furniture design

Originally made of canvas and cantilevered steel, the Wassily chair (originally known as the Model B3) has become one of the world’s most enduring and iconic pieces of furniture. Breuer designed the chair at the age of 23, while still an apprentice at the Weimar Bauhaus. Inspired by the Constructivist principles of the De Stijl movement, the Wassily chair distils its form to the bare essentials, reflecting the Bauhaus’ proclivity for functionality and simplicity. Compared to the ornate, heavy wooden furniture that preceded it, the Wassily was nothing short of a revolution.

When Breuer began designing the chair, he wanted to make a tubular steel version of the traditional overstuffed leather club chair. To deduce its form, Breuer set about experimenting with his materials and, In so doing, he redefined the material constitution of not only the classic club chair, but that of modern furniture. What remains of his initial inspiration is its mere outline, an elegant composition traced in gleaming steel. The canvas seat, back, and arms seem to float in space; the body of the sitter does not touch the steel framework. Breuer later recalled being self-conscious of his radical experiments, fearing his colleagues negative judgement: “I was myself somewhat afraid of criticism. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing these experiments.” First to admire the chair

was Wassily Kandinsky, a professor at the Bauhaus, who was so enamoured by the piece during a visit to Breuer’s studio that Breuer fashioned a duplicate for Kandinsky’s home. Breuer has recalled this encounter and the chair’s early success saying: [Wassily] Kandinsky, who came by chance to my studio when the first chair was brought in, said, “What’s this?” He was very interested and then the Bauhaus got very interested in it. A year later, I had furnished the whole Bauhaus with this furniture.” As a result of Wassily’s early interest, the chair was daubed the “Wassily” chair some years after its conception by an Italian manufacturer who heard that Wassily had admired the prototype and received a handmade version from Breuer.

The Wassily Chair’s revolutionary form has remained the subject of much interest and debate. Speaking on its sometimes-paradoxical qualities, Dr. Anna Ruth Gatlin, an assistant professor at Auburn University who teaches a two-part course in the history of interior design has observed: “Where a club chair is oversized, cushy, comfy, and so solid it grounds a room, the Wassily Chair is diminutive, especially in perceived scale, since it has so much negative space. […] The Wassily is not cushy and comfy. Its seat and back are leather [or canvas] straps. It’s got good ergonomics, so it’s comfortable, but you

Text taken and adapted from multiple sources. See endnote 1.

don’t want to curl up in it in front of a fire with a book. This is a chair with no fluff.” Despite such paradoxes, the chair has cemented its reputation as one of the most iconic pieces to emerge from the modern furniture movement. With its uniquely exposed structure, the chair came to represent how the modern design style could be applied to everyday objects. It is therefore

of little surprise that the chair has remained in near constant production. It was First mass-produced by Thonet, before the license for manufacturing the chair was picked up by the Italian firm Gavina after World War II. In 1968, the licence was in turn bought out by the American company Knoll, who retains the design trademark, and the chair remains in production today.

Image: An early prototype of the Wassily chair. Note the missing backrest bar added to subsequent manufactures.

A very Bauhuas scene: Bauhaus weaving graduate Lis Beyer sits in the Wassily chair. The dress she wears she designed herself. The theatre mask was designed by Bauhaus teacher Oscar Schlemmer and the photo was taken by Bauhaus photographer Erich Consemüller.

Image: A Wassily Chair produced between 1930 and 1935. Quote taken from: No name, “Wassily Armchair”, The Met

“It is my most extreme work both in its outward appearance and in the use of materials; it is the least artistic, the most logical, the least ‘cosy’ and the most mechanical.”

Tubular Steel

An innvoation of industry and design

The Wassily Chair

In 1925, Breuer became head of the carpentry workshop at the Bauhaus.. Also in 1925, Breuer bought his first bicycle. It is this that Breuer himself credits as the material inspiration behind the Wassily chair.

Breuer viewed the bicycle as an object that represented the paragon of design, owing in part to the fact that its form had remained largely unchanged since its inception. The tubular steel of the bicycle’s handlebars also intrigued Breuer, as it was light, durable, and suitable for mass production (a manufacturer by the name of Mannesman had recently perfected a type of seamless steel tubing that was capable of being bent without collapsing). He reasoned that if the material could be bent into handlebars, it could be bent into forms for furniture.

“At that time I was rather idealistic. Twenty-three years old. I made friends with a young architect, and I bought my first bicycle. I learned to ride the bicycle and talked to this young fellow and told him that the bicycle seems to be a perfect production because it hasn’t changed in the last twenty, thirty years. It is still the original

bicycle form. He said, “Did you ever see how they make those parts? How they bend those handlebars? You would be interested because they bend those steel tubes like macaroni.” “This somehow remained in my mind, and I started to think about steel tubes which are bent into frames— probably that is the material you could use for an elastic and transparent chair. Typically, I was very much engaged with the transparency of the form. “That is how the first chair was made...I realized that the bending had to go further. It should only be bent with no points of welding on it so it could also be chromed in parts and put together. That is how the first Wassily was born.”

Breuer’s novel use of steel exponentially expanded the possibilities of modern furniture design. Indeed, shortly after finishing the Wassily chair, Breuer pushed his experimentation with steel even further and designed the world’s first cantilevered chair, the hugely successful B32 “Cesca” chair. Within a year of the Wassily and Cesca chairs being released, designers everywhere were experimenting with the myriad opportunities that lay in tubular steel.

Image: Photomontage of Cesca tubular steel. Text and quote taken and adapted from multiple sources. See endnote 2.

“They bend those steel tubes like macaroni.”

Left image: Image from an instruction manual by Thonet, the original manufacturers of the Wassily chair. Right image: The Wassily steel frame.

Eisengarn

An innovation of tradition

The Wassily Chair

Today, the Wassily chair is most often seen bearing its iconic leather straps. This, however, is not true to Breuer’s original conception or prototypes. Indeed, it was not until the late 1940s that leather was introduced to the Wassily chair. Prior to this late intervention, Breuer’s chairs featured a robust canvas made from Eisengarn: a material whose story extends well beyond Breuer and the Bauhaus.

Eisengarn, literally meaning “iron yarn”, was invented and manufactured in Germany in the mid 1800s. As a

highly durable, waxed-cotton thread it was used for making everything from shoelaces to hat strings and ribbons. In 1927, Bauhaus weaver and textile designer Margaretha Reichardt began experimenting with Eisengarn, as she often did with the yarns and fabrics she used to create fabric collages. In so doing, she improved the quality of the Eisengarn thread, producing robust and stable bands that she then developed into a new canvas material. It is this improved material that Breuer adopted for the back, seat and armrests of his tubular steel chairs.

Image left: photomontage of Eisengarn canvas.

Image top: Margaretha Reichardt. Text bassed on: Otto and Rössler, Bauhaus Women.

Image: Eisengarn colour and stitching detail on Breuer’s Model B55 cantilever tubular steel chair.

Image: Eisengarn colour variations on Breuer’s Model B34 cantilever tubular steel chairs.

Endnotes

Text taken and adapted from:

Coyote, “Marcel Breuer: Hungarian-American Designer, Sculptor, and Architect”, The Art Story.

Potts, “Meet the Wassily Chair, an Icon of Modern Design Whose History Dates Back to the 1920s”, Better Homes and Gardens.

No name, “Product Story”, Knoll.

Text taken and adapted from:

Coyote, “Marcel Breuer: Hungarian-American Designer, Sculptor, and Architect”, The Art Story.

No name, “Product Story”, Knoll.

No name, “Wassily Armchair”, The Met

Images

Title

4

No name, “Product Story”, Knoll.

No name, “Everything Is Design: Revisiting the Legacy of the Bauhaus School”, Yatzer.

Potts, “Meet the Wassily Chair, an Icon of Modern Design Whose History Dates Back to the 1920s”, Better Homes and Gardens.

12

13

15

17

19

20

21

22

23

24

No name, “Photographs of Bauhaus in the 1920s”, Flashbak.

Ibid.

No name, “Club Chair”, Vienna Museum of Applied Arts.

Photomontage and imagery by Andrew Holt.

No name, “Everything Is Design: Revisiting the Legacy of the Bauhaus School”, Yatzer.

No name, “Pair of Marcel Breuer for Knoll “Wassily” Chair Frames”, 1stDibs.

Photomontage and imagery by Andrew Holt.

No name, “Vier Bauhausmädels”, Kunstmuseen Erfurt

Imagery by Andrew Holt.

Ibid.

Bibliography

Coyote, Nicholas, “Marcel Breuer: Hungarian-American Designer, Sculptor, and Architect”, The Art Story. Accessed: 15.02.2023.

Drost, Magdalena, Bauhaus: 1919-1933, Bauhaus-Archiv Museum für Gestaltun, 1998.

Otto, Elizabeth, & Rössler, Patrick, Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective, Bloomsbury, 2019.

Potts, Leanne, “Meet the Wassily Chair, an Icon of Modern Design Whose History Dates Back to the 1920s”, Better Homes and Gardens. Accessed: 15.02.2023.

No name, “Club Chair”, Vienna Museum of Applied Arts. Accessed: 15.02.2023.

No name, “Club chair (model B3)”, MoMA. Accessed: 15.02.2023.

No name, “Everything Is Design: Revisiting the Legacy of the Bauhaus School”, Yatzer. Accessed: 15.02.2023.

No name, “Pair of Marcel Breuer for Knoll “Wassily” Chair Frames”, 1stDibs. Accessed: 15.02.2023.

No name, “Photographs of Bauhaus in the 1920s”, Flashbak. Accessed: 15.02.2023.

No name, “Product Story”, Knoll. Accessed: 15.02.2023.

No name, “Vier Bauhausmädels”, Kunstmuseen Erfurt. Accessed: 15.02.2023.

No name, “Wassily Armchair”, The Met. Accessed: 15.02.2023.

Published in 2023

Edited by Andrew Holt

For the Bauhaus Archive Berlin, Museum of Design at the Institute of Art, Design + Technology Kill Avenue, Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, Ireland, A96 KH79

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Copyright © 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced to be transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Text & cover design: Andrew Holt