The chair for this installation of Know Your Chairs has a whimsical inspiration: the bent steel tubing of bicycle handlebars!
Hungarian architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer left home at 18 not to join the circus but to join the new architectural movement known as Bauhaus. While heading the wood shop at the Bauhaus School, he designed possibly one of the most important pieces of furniture in the 20th century: the B3 Chair. A friend of his at the school encouraged Breuer to buy a bicycle and learn to ride...and they began talking about the construction of bicycles at the time. Breuer later recalled his friend saying, "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 was revolutionary at the time because the German steel manufacturer Mannesmann had recently perfected a way of producing hollow steel tubing without any seams, making the bend of the B3 steel frame possible.
Once the prototype was in Breuer's studio, the artist Wassily Kandinsky, a friend and colleague of Breuer's, came by to visit and was instantly drawn to this highly unique chair. It had the silhouette of a lounge chair but distilled down to the essence of its planes, with fabric straps suspended between the tubing. It is now known as the Wassily chair and can be found in interiors around the world.
Knoll and Knoll-approved dealers like Design Within Reach currently hold the license. You can buy one of your very own in different leathers, even hair-on-hide. It fits perfectly into nearly any interior narrative, whether modernist and minimal or eclectic and even Bohemian!
Happy designing!
