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S 43 Classic
S 32 / S 32 N
S 64 / S 64 N
S 33 / S 34
Flat Bat Brno Chair
S 43 F Classic
S 32 N / S 64 N Pure Materials
S 533
8 Tabouret tournant
S 32 PV / S 64 PV Pure Materials
S 32 V / S 64 V Pure Materials
S 32 L
S 32 V / S 64 V Pure Materials Special Edition
Special Edition
S 43 Swivel Chair
7 Fauteuil tournant
S 33 N All Seasons
S 34 N All Seasons
S 533 N All Seasons
S 43 K (Children's Chair)
MR Chair
Roquebrune Chair
S 40 Outdoor

Bauhaus Chairs

The Bauhaus S 32 and S 64 chairs are classic design classics

Bauhaus chairs

Among the major influences on the development of the Bauhaus furniture tradition were without question Marcel Breuer, Mart Stam and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In context of their work as both designers and architects the trio created numerous furniture designs throughout the 1920s and 1930s which were to go on to become established, and much loved, furniture design classics. Especially popular were the chair designs and for all the cantilever chair: the unchallenged symbol of the Bauhaus era. The first cantilever chair, a chair with tubular steel frame and cantilever seat, was designed in 1926 by Mart Stam. Steel tubing was, next to plywood and sheet glass, the preferred material of the Bauhaus style - not least on account of its low cost and its ease of transporting - and the clear and cool metal quickly became a synonym for the relentless reform of furniture design during the era of classical modernism.


The cantilever chair

With the development of the Bauhaus cantilever chair in the 1920s the classic chair with its four legs was challenged and replaced by a cantilevered steel frame. An s-shaped curved base gave the necessary stability while also allowing for a smooth swinging of the chair. Although the Bauhaus students Marcel Breuer and Mart Stam were instrumental in developing this intrinsically Bauhaus design, the artistic copyright was awarded to Mart Stam for his chairs S 43 and S 43 F with armrests, works which have always been produced by Thonet.

Kragstuhl with wicker work seat

Thonet advertising for tubular steel furniture, such as the cantilever chair

The Kragstuhl

Just as with cantilever chairs Kragstühle - overhang chairs - have no hind legs; however, unlike the cantilever chair the more rigidly constructed Kragstühle frame does not move with the user, thus there is no feathering effect. The most important manufacturer of Kragstühle is the German producer Tecta whose Kragstuhl portfolio more than meets the standards of the classic Bauhaus cantilever chair. The Tecta chair designs from 1997 are formally very similar to a design by the French designer Jean Prouvé and are typically covered with a woven material.


More about 'Chairs' in our blog

Monobloc by Hauke Wendler

With furniture, as with so much in life, it is rarely the showy, high profile, works, or individuals, that teach us most, but those works, and those individuals, who in their anonymity and modesty accompany us in invisible silence. Or rather the anonymous and...

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...Originating in context of, and presented parallel to, the exhibition Chairs: Dieckmann!... de/burg-galerie/ Chairs: Dieckmann!...

Chairs: Dieckmann! The Forgotten Bauhäusler Erich Dieckmann at Neuwerk 11, Halle

..."1 With the exhibition Chairs: Dieckmann!... 2 And indeed unlike Junge Dieckmann was a member of the NSDAP; and as Aya Soika convincingly discusses in the Chairs: Dieckmann!...

Bentwood and Beyond. Thonet and Modern Furniture Design @ the MAK – Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna

...For our part we were particularly perturbed by the claim in the section on Plastic Chairs that the high sales figures for Gerd Lange's early 1970s Flex 2000 indicate that "Thonet had its finger on the pulse of the plastic age" If there's one thing the Thonet (hi)story teaches us it is that "plastic age" (largely) passed them by, that having established the company on two material/technological innovations they missed a third, lest we forget, which we can't because they are two examples in the exhibition, in the 1950s & 60s Thonet cooperated with Verner Panton on wooden chairs, you do the math... A state of affairs Bentwood and Beyond with its inter-twinned specific and general discussions on 200 years of modern furniture design very convincingly, satisfyingly, underscores and reinforces; despite moments such as Plastic Chairs or Super Normal Bentwood and Beyond isn't a hagiographic celebration of Thonet, but a series of reflections on Thonet in context of wider realities, a series of reflections on the (hi)story of furniture design and the path to our contemporary furniture understandings through the conduit of Thonet, and for all an exhibition which tends to underscore and reinforce the truism that continually evolving social, cultural, economic, technical, et al realities not only carries design forth but defines, and continually redefines, our relationships to our objects of daily use, demanding the new, discarding the obsolete, the foolish, the faddish while preserving, nurturing, certain universal archetypes as it rolls onwards...


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