Marcel Breuer - Wassily Armchair - Bauhaus

• The Wassily Chair was designed by Marcel Breuer in 1925-26. 
• Revolutionary at the time - use of tubular steel.
  
• Originally made from nickel lead tubular steel. 
  
• Wassily chair is now made with a polished chrome-finished tubular steel frame.
  
• Thick cowhide leather slings of the chairs show style yet are comfortable

The chair, which now has become a symbol of modernism, is essentially a club chair with the upholstery removed. It appears to be a series of planes floating in space. The chair is typically early modernist in its Utopian evocation of weightlessness, dematerialization and transcendence. 

Marcel Breuer 21 May 1902 – 1 July 1981

'Affordable furniture for the masses'

• Architecture and furniture designer.
• An influential Hungarian-born modernist of Jewish descent. 
• One of the masters of modernism
• Breuer displayed interest in modular construction and simple forms.
• Student and teacher at Bauhaus.
• Breuer considered all his designs to be essential for modern day living

• Breuer attempts to reduce furniture to its minimum functionally-necessary form.
•  Tries to look at inexpensively mass-producing rather than one-off pieces.

'Affordable furniture for the masses'

Bauhaus - Brief over view

• School in Germany that combined crafts and fine arts.
• Famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught.
• It operated from 1919-1933 (Shut down by the Nazi's)

Bauhaus -1919 - 1933

• School of art, architecture and design established by modern architect, Walter Gropius at Weimar in Germany in 1919
• Teaching method replaced pupil-teacher relationship with the idea of community artists working together.
• It's aim to bring art back with the contact of everyday life, and design was given as much weight as fine art
• The Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925/6 where Gropius created a new building for it. 
• In 1932 it moved to Berlin where it got shut down by the Nazi's
• Moholy-Nagy opened a new Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937