The chairs can be found in the permanent collections of museums like MoMA and the V&A.ĭesigner: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich While the Wassily and Cesca chairs have become the holy grail for modern designers, their design is as surprising now as it was in its first years. Three years later, Breuer would introduce through Knoll the Cesca, a simplified version of the chair that features a cane seat.
The sculptural, abstract chair was a milestone in the history of modern furniture, offering a sitting experience in which one is suspended over the base, seemingly floating on air, with just two legs for support (and a comfortable bounce). While his cohorts, the Dutch architect Mart Stam and German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, were experimenting with the same materials and showed their designs in public first at the Die Wohnung exhibition, it was Breuer’s version-which had better proportions and was more hard-wearing and comfortable-that ultimately revolutionized furniture. Fascinated by bicycle handlebars, Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer introduced the first chair made from tubular steel in 1925. Even Le Corbusier himself considered this the chair that best shares the aesthetic of his modern architecture, placing it in nearly all of his buildings.īehold the Wassily B3 Chair, the first successful cantilever chair that defied the four-legged standard. With its near-circular seat frame and its hoop splat back, the Thonet 209 armchair is the icon for modernists. “It is the biggest selling chair model of all time, with 50 million units sold by 1930,” Fiell explains. Thonet set up a furniture manufacturing company in Vienna with his five sons, where the chair is still in production today. Created by Prussian-born cabinetmaker Michael Thonet, who was experimenting with new methods of bending solid wood with steam and molding it to shape with mechanical presses, this chair was originally designed for the Daum coffeehouse in Vienna. The bentwood chair, also known as the Thonet 209, not only deserves a place in the history books for its popularity as the quintessential restaurant chair, but also because it emerged from one of the most significant innovations in the timeline of the modern chair. So draw up a chair, and don’t sit this one out. Read on for the 20 chair designs we believe are worth knowing-and, if you’re feeling inspired, owning. So, by all means, appreciate them from afar or bring one into your home to be used as it was intended. Whether it’s a revolutionary design like Michael Thonet’s totemic bentwood armchair or Le Corbusier’s machine age Grand Confort LC2 armchair, the sculptural tulip chair or the world’s first totally transparent polycarbonate chair, each furnishing deserves a seat in the hall of design fame.Īnd while such tasteful design objects are worthy of being savored as museum-worthy specimens, they were also intended to support everyday life.
Among such iterations, certain perches have forged their own path beyond the derivative and act as testaments to enduring design and remarkable ingenuity. Of course, for every really good chair, there are myriad failed attempts that have paved the way. “It can be a physical, psychological, structural, intellectual, contextual, ideological, emotional, aesthetic, cultural, or even a spiritual connection,” Fiell explains. “From existing chairs, both from our contemporary times but also thousands-of-years-old chairs, we can learn about comfort, ergonomics, quality, material, functionality, connections, dimensions, and not least, sustainability.”Īs for what makes a good chair, Liv Buur deems that a successful build is “a comfortable seat that lives up to its function and is sustainable within material, connections, and longevity.” Fiell adds that beyond such considerations-a truly great chair fundamentally offers a special connection with its user. “If you study the history of the chair, you rediscover the world,” Stine Liv Buur, manager of the classics collection at Vitra, explains. And no wonder, when it offers insight into what makes us tick. “The chair is among the most designed, studied, written about, and celebrated artifacts of the modern era,” design historian Peter Fiell tells ELLE DECOR. All of which has made this practical domestic necessity, at its best, an emblem of status, style, and artistry. While its basic body-supporting functionality has hardly changed, the chair has seen countless interpretations that encompass ever-changing tastes and evolving materials, technologies, and ideologies. No design element is more universal than the chair.
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