Thonet´s Collaboration with Marcel Breuer

The Austrian furniture producer Thonet began, after a long period of bentwood produktion, experimenting with tubular steel as a material. It is believed that designers at the Bauhaus, which by that time had moved from Weimar to Dessau, understood that this could be an interesting way of making a new form of chairs. Chairs which would not stand on 4 legs but would instead be built as so called "Freischwinger" (free swinging). They not only looked modern without back legs - they even were comfortable since the construction allowed light rocking. The School of Bauhaus introduced even new housing concepts with plain and rectangular floor plans. Thus, modern types of furniture were needed to match the style. Among the pioneers of this development is the Hungarian-American carpenter Marcel Breuer, who was one of the first and one of the youngest students at the Bauhaus. Walter Gropius saw his talent early and Breuer became the head over the carpenter department of the school. Here he designed some of the most famous chairs from that era, called Cantilever Chairs. Best known might be the Wassily Chair (last picture), developed in 1925 by Marcel Breuer. In 1928 he leaves the Bauhaus, seeking for more creative freedom, and works mainly with interior design and architecture. He even seeks collaboration with the Thonet Company which in 1929 takes over his company "Standard Möbel", which designed and produced his early furniture with a base of turbular steel. He works for Thonet over a period of 11 years which results in a beautiful collection of steel furniture, combined with parts from bentwood, black wood, raffia weave, glas or leather. 1937, Breuer emigrated to the USA and became professor for architecture at Harvard University. He created among other famous buildings the Whitney Museum in New York and the UNESCO building in Paris. Thus, Breuer became one of the central figures in modern design- and architecture history. Interestingly, Thonet Company still produces the most important design chairs from that era and they can be seen all over the world. Most people just aren't aware of the interesting and groundbreaking history of these furnitures - prototypes for modernism.