During the 1920s, Bauhaus designer and architect Marcel Breuer created numerous furniture designs that today have become classics and are widely used by interior designers for both home and business interiors.
Breuer’s innovation was to use bent steel tubes in the creation of furniture. At that time, using steel tubes for furniture was a revolutionary idea. Breuer had been inspired by the handlebars on his family bikes, and for the first time the use of bent steel tubes was feasible because German steel manufacturer Mannesmann was able to perfect the seamless steel tube manufacturing process.
As he said: If you can bend a tube on a handlebar, why can’t you bend it on a piece of furniture? “The result was furniture that was lightweight, functional, and attractive. Because it was inexpensive to mass-produce, it met both the social and aesthetic ideals of the modernist movement.
Although Breuer created many durable chair designs, the Breuer chair generally refers to the Cesca chair that he created in 1928 and was later named after his daughter Francesca. The innovative design of the Cesca chair was its elegant cantilevered shape using the tubular steel frame and the wood and cane seat and back.
But the Cesca Chair was not Breuer’s first breakthrough in modern furniture design; That honor belongs to the classic Model B3 chair, later renamed the Wassily Chair in honor of Breuer’s friend, artist Wassily Kandinsky.
Both the Cesca and Wassily chairs have been in production since the late 1920s. The trademark rights for both the Cesca Chair and the Wassily Chair are owned by Knoll, a company founded by Hans G. Knoll in 1938 in New York. The Knoll Group still produces several Breuer furniture designs, and in particular two of its classic designs, the Cesca Chair and the Wassily Chair. Reproduction chairs are also produced by other manufacturers around the world, who use different names to market the furniture.
The Wassily chairs currently available through Knoll have the following specifications: The dimensions of the chair are 31 inches wide x 27 1.2 inches deep x 29 inches high, with a seat height of 16 ½ inches. The seat surface is made of thick cowhide leather upholstery available in black, light brown or white beige.
Breuer’s next revolutionary design, after the Wassily chair, was the Cesca chair. The design of the B5 chair was intended to be “a dramatic antidote to the overstuffed seats of the Edwardian era.”
A true cantilever design, the Cesca chair has no legs at the rear and relies on the tensile properties of steel tubes. Breuer’s brilliant idea was to use unreinforced steel tubing, thus creating a free-rocking chair that came close to his ideal of “sitting on columns of air.”
This chair was Breuer’s greatest financial success and, while radical for its time, today it seems logical, delicate and strong. A large number of companies have produced this extremely popular design, so it can be difficult to select the “official” manufacturers of the Cesca Chair, and there are many excellent reproductions, but there have been three companies that worked directly with Breuer on production. of the Cesca Chair.
Thonet was the first, from 1927 until World War II. During the 1950s, Dino Gavina, a furniture manufacturer in Foligno, Italy, began making furniture with the participation of Breuer. Then, during the 1960s, Knoll bought Gavina, who are today the only manufacturers of authentic “Cesca” chairs.
When purchasing a Cesca chair, there are a few details to keep in mind that differentiate a high-quality Cesca chair from a poorly reproduced one: 1) the front edge of the wooden seat should curve slightly downward with the downward sweep of the pipe; 2) the ends of the tubes must be continuous with the tubes (seamless between the tube and the cap); and 3) tube bends must maintain a constant radius and not flatten slightly when bending. The Knoll Cesca chair is available in a version without arms and with an armchair.
After leaving the Bauhaus, Breuer continued his experiments with furniture design and briefly worked for the Isokon Company in Great Britain. His design for the Isokon recliner chair was influenced by Alvar Aalto, who was working with molded wood in Finland at the same time. Interestingly, Alvar Aalto had inspired himself by Breuer’s tubular steel furniture from the 1920s.
In 1935, when Breuer came to London to design furniture for Isokon, he had planned to continue his work using steel tubes. However, Isokon owner Jack Pritchard insisted that Breuer should work in wood rather than metal, and preferably in plywood. Pritchard had prior experience in the plywood business, leading him to found a furniture company. When the former director of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius arrived in London in 1935, this solidified his plans. He became Isolkon’s design controller and it was he who suggested that Pritchard hire Breuer, the former master of the Bauhaus carpentry workshop, as a designer.
The result was the design of a magnificent five-piece set that included an armchair, a daybed, and a nest of tables, now considered milestones in 20th-century furniture design.
Although the company produced furniture by various designers, it was Breuer’s designs that ultimately brought Isokon international fame. Isokon designs from the 1930s have endured to the present day and are among the most important and original furniture designs of the 20th century.
All of these chair designs – the Cesca, Wassily and Isokon chairs – have remained classics since they were created in the early 1900s, and they continue to be a stylish and durable addition to any home or office setting.
