Mid-Century German S32 Cantilever Chair by Marcel Breuer & Mart Stam for Thonet, 1970s

Born and raised in Pecs, Hungary, famed modernist architect-designer Marcel Breuer earned a scholarship to study painting and sculpture at Vienna Academy of Fine Art in 1920, but quickly dropped out and applied to the Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany. After completing his preliminary courses there, he trained at the Bauhaus furniture workshop between 1921 and 1924. He then went on to run the furniture workshop at the new Bauhuas in Dessau, where he created what is cited as the first tubular steel armchair (1925-1926), presented in 1927 as the Type B3 Steel Club Chair (and later renamed the Wassily after Bauhaus teacher Wassily Kandinsky).

After a brief spell in Switzerland Breuer joined former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius in London in 1935. As Breuer’s career progressed, he began to focus more on architectural projects than design. In addition to his tubular steel furniture and plywood pieces for the Isokon company, he was recognized for residences, shop interiors, and multiple competition entries.

In 1937, Breuer and Gropius moved to the US, both teaching for a time at Harvard and briefly partnering in an architectural practice. Together, they designed the Pennsylvania Pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair in addition to multiple private dwellings. Their partnership dissolved in 1941, but the two remained friends. In 1946, Breuer left Harvard and opened an office in New York. Over the course of the rest of his career, Breuer designed over seventy private houses and multiple university and office buildings. Notably, in 1948, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a touring exhibition of his work, and the following year, commissioned him to design a house in its garden; both events significantly boosted Breuer's career. In 1953, he designed UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris with Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfulss, and, in 1963, he designed the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Breuer died in New York in 1981.

Pioneering Dutch modernist architect-designer Mart Stam (1899-1966) was a famous proponent for New Objectivity, a German cultural movement advocating for a return to unsentimental reality. He is also credited with designing the first cantilevered chair in furniture history.

Born in North Holland in 1899, Martinus Adianus “Mart” Stam earned a degree in drawing from the Royal School for Advanced Studies in Amsterdam (1917-19). After graduating, he moved to Rotterdam to work as a draftsman in the architectural office of Marinus Jan Granpré Molière (1883-1972), whose mentoring had a lifelong impact on Stam’s career.

In 1922, Stam won the right to design an urban plan concept for The Hague. Stam’s designs included roads that ran perpendicular to the beach, a novel concept that had yet to be seen. Later that year, Stam moved to Berlin and worked together with architect Max Taut (1884-1967) and Russian avant-garde architect El Lissitzky (1890-1941)—who became a lifelong friend—on various projects. During this time, Stam began developing his signature “New Objectivity” style.

Founded in the aftermath of World War I by Weimar artists Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz, Neue Sachlichkeit (German for “New Objectivity”) was a cross-discipline movement and aesthetic approach that was dedicated to practical engagement with the world. The Bauhaus school was founded on these sober but idealistic principles, which resulted in designs characterized by reduced forms and new materials. Turning away from expressionism, proponents of New Objectivity rejected romantic idealism in favor of realism, rationality, and order.

Stam worked alongside the likes of Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Peter Berens, Bruno Taut, Hans Peolzig, and Walter Gropius during the landmark Die Wohnung exhibition for the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart in 1927. His contribution to the project included the Nr. 28 House in the White House Settlement, designing both the outside and inside. It was here that he unveiled his first set of cantilevered chairs, which would spark a whole new genre of like-minded designs. Stam’s S33 and S34 Chairs (both 1926) utilized bent tubular steel, which was thought to be the material of the future during the heyday of the modernist era. These chairs revolutionized modern furniture, as the robust nature of the tubes facilitated minimalist yet durable designs. The chair also resulted in a copyright feud between Stam and Marcel Breuer, which Stam won. Thonet put Stam’s cantilevered chair designs in production in 1932.

Throughout his career, Stam held many acclaimed positions, including the editor of the avant-garde magazine ABC—Contributions to Building, the head of the Academy of Arts & Crafts in Amsterdam, and the director of the Conservatory for Applied Art in Berlin-Weißensee. After a short stint living in Amsterdam, he moved to Zurich and retired in 1966. Stam passed away later that year at the age of 86. 

Thonet—the oldest surviving furniture company in the world—began its long life in 1819, when cabinetmaker Michael Thonet (1796-1871) established a furniture workshop in Boppard, Germany. A proponent of the Biedermeier style, he specialized in chairs, tables, and storage pieces characterized by clean lines, reduced ornamentation, and an emphasis on functionalist principles. By the 1830s, Thonet’s experiments in laminated and steam-bent wood furniture, like his famous Boppard Chair (1836), brought international acclaim. Thonet’s designs achieved a combination of lightness, durability, and comfort unknown in European furniture at the time.

A great fan of his work, Prince Metternich of Austria invited Thonet to present his designs to the Viennese court in 1842. Finding so much support there, Thonet opened a new company in Vienna in 1849. In 1853, he transferred his company to his sons, and Gebrüder Thonet was established.

Through the second half of the 19th century, Gebrüder Thonet designs grew increasingly popular with the cultural vanguard, especially among progressive design thinkers and tastemakers. One design in particular, the No. 14 Café Chair (ca. 1859), led the way to international success: the chair’s innovative bending technique was well suited to industrial production, and its rationalized, easily assembled structure allowed for efficient packing and shipping. In 1850, Anna Daum famously outfitted her fashionable Viennese café with No. 14 Chairs, and by the 1870s, Gebrüder Thonet had sales offices across Europe and the US. To date, more than 50 million No. 14 Chairs have been sold worldwide–not counting the untold pirated copies.

Iconic pieces from the traditional Gebrüder Thonet collection include Rocking Chair No. 1 (1860), No. 14 Café Chair (ca. 1859), Adolf Loos’s Café Museum Chair (1899), No. 209 Armchair (ca. 1900), Otto Wagner’s No. 247 Postal Savings Bank Chair (1904), and Josef Hoffmann’s No. 811 (1925). In the early years of the 20th century, Gebrüder Thonet also began producing designs in bent tubular steel by Bauhaus masters like Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Mart Stam.

In the aftermath of World War II, Thonet lost all of its production facilities in Eastern Europe, and the sales office at Vienna’s Stephansplatz had been destroyed. Between 1945 and 1953, Georg Thonet, the great-grandson of company founder Michael Thonet, led the rebuilding. Economic success returned quickly. In the ensuing decades, the company commissioned designs from many outstanding designers, such as Verner Panton, Pierre Paulin, Norman Foster, James Irvine, Piero Lissoni, and Stefan Diez. Classic Thonet pieces can be found in museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou and Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, and the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

In 1976 Thonet was divided into two separate German and Austrian companies, which remain independent of each other. Today, Thonet GmbH is headquartered in Frankenberg, Germany and continues to manufacture the original, bentwood and tubular steel designs alongside new pieces by contemporary, international architects and designers. Originally opened in 1861 by Thonet himself, the furniture factory TON (Továrna Ohýbaného Nábytku), which is located in what is known today as the Czech Republic, continues to manufacture Thonet designs. 

* All images courtesy of Thonet.de