Now I Sit Me Down (16 page)

It is impossible to overstate the impact of Breuer's chair on the architectural avant-garde. The design ethos of the time was “starting over,” that is, doing away with traditional forms and traditional ornament. In buildings this meant flat-roofed, undecorated white boxes, but how to start over in furniture? The Red Blue Chair was more like a manifesto than an actual piece of furniture, nor was it really suited to industrial production, despite its maker's claim. Tubular steel, on the other hand, was an industrial product—and looked it. This was the first technical innovation in furniture-making since Michael Thonet developed bentwood sixty-five years earlier.

Breuer was uniquely qualified to lead the way. He had experience, having built furniture for several of Gropius's projects and for Bauhaus exhibitions. He had sufficient expertise in carpentry to pass a journeyman's exam after graduation, but his imagination was not constrained by traditional furniture-making techniques. He belonged to the first generation that was trained in modernist design principles—when Breuer had been a Bauhaus student, the master of the carpentry shop and his teacher was Johannes Itten, the Swiss expressionist painter and radical design theorist.

For Breuer, the five years following the introduction of the Wassily Chair were intensely productive. He designed a variety of furniture for the new Bauhaus buildings: side chairs and sofa beds for the faculty housing, tilt-up theater seats for the auditorium, and tables and stools for the cafeteria—all in tubular steel. The furniture was handmade in the school workshop but Breuer had industrial production in mind; like Thonet, he used standardized parts and designed the chairs to be knocked down for shipping. In 1927, together with Kalman Lengyel, a fellow Hungarian, Breuer founded Standard-Möbel specifically to manufacture and market his own furniture.

Thanks to Lengyel's mismanagement the company foundered, and it was soon acquired by Gebrüder Thonet, which, starting in 1928, took over the manufacture of Breuer's designs. Although tubular steel chairs are often described as lightweight and inexpensive, compared with bentwood they were neither. Steel is heavier than wood (the Wassily Chair weighs thirty pounds, almost twice as much as a typical bentwood lounge chair), and precision tubular steel was expensive: a Breuer side chair cost about three times as much as a typical café chair. Nevertheless, Thonet wanted to diversify, and tubular steel furniture was the perfect opportunity to be in the forefront of the industry once again.

Breuer had noticed that if the Bauhaus cafeteria stool was turned on its side it became, in effect, a seat supported on two legs—a cantilever chair. There had been several earlier attempts to build cantilever chairs. The most serious effort was made by Mart Stam, a Dutch architect living in Berlin, who in 1926 began experimenting with tubular furniture. Stam built a crude cantilever chair out of threaded steel pipes connected by plumbing elbows; the first prototype collapsed when he sat on it, but he persevered. Whether he got the idea after talking to Breuer and seeing his tubular experiments, as Breuer later claimed, or whether he developed the concept independently remains unclear, but there is no doubt that the tubular steel and canvas chair that Stam displayed at the 1927 Weissenhoff Exhibition in Stuttgart is the first successful example of a cantilever chair.

The Weissenhoff housing exhibition, which featured buildings designed by leading avant-garde architects such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Josef Frank, and Mart Stam, was coordinated by Mies van der Rohe. At an organizational meeting, Stam showed Mies a sketch of his idea for a cantilever chair. Mies recognized the breakthrough that the chair represented and immediately set about designing his own version, which was also displayed at the Stuttgart exhibition. Mies's design is much more elegant than Stam's—the front legs curve into the seat in a sweeping arc—and it also includes a small but crucial difference. Stam used cast tubing and reinforced the bends by inserting pieces of solid steel rod, which created a strong but perfectly rigid frame. Like Breuer, Mies used Mannessmann tubing, which allowed the chair to flex. Such springiness, analogous to the movement of a rocking chair, was something entirely new in sitting furniture.

Although Mies had previously designed wood furniture, the MR10 was his first chair in tubular steel, and it is a reflection of his talent that he was able to produce this beautiful chair in only six months. But he was not experienced in designing for industry. While the MR10 looked extremely simple, it was not easy to fabricate and turned out to be the most expensive tubular chair in Thonet's line. The design had another drawback: like all cantilever chairs, it tended to tip forward if you sat on the edge. Thonet modified the design to lessen the tippiness, but it could not be removed altogether. It's always risky to sit on the edge of a cantilever chair.

A year after Mies produced the MR10, Breuer unveiled his own version of a cantilever side chair. The Wassily Chair had been a youthful effort that privileged aesthetics over practicality. Now, although still only twenty-six, Breuer was an experienced designer and he brought the two into balance with his Cesca Chair, manufactured by Thonet as B32.
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The seat and back are beechwood frames with woven cane inserts; because the frames are shaped and curved they are more comfortable than stretched fabric or leather. In addition, the frames act as bracing, reducing the amount of tubing required. The armchair version (B64) extends the tubular frame to support wooden armrests. Later in Breuer's career, when he was designing houses, he regularly incorporated traditional materials such as fieldstone and rough slate, leading Philip Johnson to quip that Breuer was a “peasant mannerist.” The enduring appeal of the Cesca Chair derives from a similar combination of tradition with innovation, shaped wood and woven cane with shiny steel. Starting over, but also looking back.

MR10 cantilever chair (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe)

Cesca Chair (Marcel Breuer)

Although the MR10 and the Cesca were acclaimed by modernist architects, tubular steel furniture was not a runaway commercial success. According to Christopher Wilk of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the royalties paid by Thonet to Breuer suggest that “sales may not have amounted to more than a few hundred pieces a year.” The 1920s did see an unexpected revival of early Thonet bentwood chairs, thanks largely to their newfound popularity among the architectural avant-garde. Le Corbusier, for example, was a great admirer of bentwood chairs. One of his favorites was the No. B9
Schreibtischfauteuil
, a writing armchair with a circular seat and arms that curved into the circular backrest. Le Corbusier's work was well publicized, and Thonet's bentwood furniture—much of which was now more than fifty years old—became associated with the radical new architecture.

No. A811F chair (Josef Frank)

Le Corbusier did not design any bentwood chairs himself, but another modernist architect did: the Viennese Josef Frank. A friend of Adolf Loos and a protégé of Hoffmann, Frank refined an earlier Thonet chair that had been designed in the mid-1920s by Adolf Gustav Schneck. Schneck had used a single continuous piece of bentwood to form the back as well as the two arms. Frank used the same configuration but replaced the solid seat with woven cane and added a caned backrest. He also eliminated the leg brace and gave the legs a slight flare, resulting in a poised, delicate stance that recalls a cabriole. The No. A811F is the bentwood chair I had in my university office.
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Despite using nineteenth-century techniques, the well-proportioned, squarish form is markedly modern; it is also a very comfortable chair. The simplicity of the design—only six pieces—rivals the classic café chair. Michael Thonet would have approved.

On Bent Knee

Thonet featured No. A811F on the cover of its 1933 catalogue. By then, tubular steel furniture had run its course.
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The British writer on design John Gloag considered it a “rather bleak phase of functionalism in design.” The novelist Aldous Huxley was more cutting: “Personally I very much dislike the aseptic, hospital style of furnishing. To dine off an operating table, to loll in a dentist's chair—this is not my idea of domestic bliss.” Even some modernist architects had doubts. “The tubular steel chair is surely rational from technical and constructive points of view,” wrote one. “It is light, suitable for mass production, and so on. But steel and chromium surfaces are not satisfactory from the human point of view.”

The man who wrote that was the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. He had at first been enthusiastic about tubular steel furniture. As early as 1928, he had bought a set of Breuer's furniture—including a Wassily Chair—for his own home, and he used Breuer's cantilever side chairs in a restaurant project. He and his wife, Aino, also an architect, designed a stacking “hybrid chair” that combined a tubular frame with a molded plywood seat. Aalto called it “the world's first soft wooden chair” because it had the characteristic springiness of a cantilever chair. But in time he became dissatisfied with steel furniture. What disturbed him was the very thing that appealed to the “house is a machine for living” architects—the cold, hard, industrial shininess of the material.

Alvar and Aino Aalto set out to design modern furniture using wood instead of tubular steel. The Aaltos were architects, but they approached the problem like cabinetmakers. Emulating Michael Thonet, they began with the fabrication process. The first challenge was the material: Finnish birch is not as flexible as Moravian beechwood, and it can be bent in only one direction, parallel to the grain. Working with a local master joiner, they experimented with different ways of bending, shaping, gluing, and laminating birchwood. The opportunity to apply this knowledge came in 1929 when the Aaltos won a competition to design a tuberculosis sanatorium near Paimio, Finland. They were responsible for the interior design: hardware, lighting fixtures, wardrobes, as well as assorted furniture: tables, waiting room armchairs, reading room chairs, cafeteria side chairs, outdoor reclining chairs, physicians' swivel desk chairs, and laboratory stools. The most original designs were two all-wood lounge chairs that used a single piece of thin curved plywood as a seat, supported by a frame made out of bent veneered birch.
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One frame was a cantilever and the other was a closed loop; like the Wassily Chair, both models were supported by runners. All-wood furniture suited a sanatorium, being less noisy when moved compared with tubular steel. Aesthetically, the curving wood frames were less machinelike, and the wide wooden frames made for better armrests.