Marcel Breuer

Marcel Brauer was an architect, designer and teacher who was born in Hungary. He studied at the Bahaus school of design in Germany, where later he also practiced architecture. He left to England in 1933, after the rise of the Nazi party, before going to America four years later . There he helped develop the school of architecture at Harvard University. Between the 50’s and 60’s he designed a number of building in Europe and the U.S. Brauer’s buildings are usually made of simple blocks in rough, unfinished stone or concrete and wood.

Cesca Chair

After designing the Wassily Chair Breuer designed the Cesca Chair. Cesca chair, named after his daughter Francesca, combines of user-friendly caning and hardwood Beech with the industrial-age aesthetic of cantilevered tubular steel. Functional, simple and modern. Cesca chair has no legs and it relies on supporting from the rigid properties of steel tubing. It uses non-reinforced steel tubing, thereby creating a free-swinging chair that came close to his idea of "sitting on columns of air."

Wassily Chair

The Wassily Chair, also known as the Model B3 chair, was designed by the head of the Bauhaus Marcel Breuer in 1925-1926. It was later named as the Wassily Chair after a story about Breuer’s friend and colleague at Bauhaus, Wassily Kandinsky.  After first producing the Model B3 Chair prototype, Kandinsky was so enthralled with the chair that Breuer decided to produce another for Wassily Kandinsky himself.  This friendship, and the later popularity of Kandinsky led the producers of the Model B3 Chair to change its name to the now famous Wassily Chair. Marcel Breuer found his inspiration for the chair in the bent form of a bicycle handlebar, available for the first time in steel due to a development in technology. The German steel manufacturer Mannesmann had developed a process to produce seamless steel tubing, the first to allow tubes to be bent without breaking at the seam.  Breuer’s Adler bicycle featured such tubing, which inspired the designer to employ this material in furniture. In the beginning, It was produced in both a folding and a non-folding versions. In this early iteration, the straps were made of fabric, pulled taut on the reverse side with the use of springs. And re-introduced version was available in hard leather.

Steel Classics. 2011. Cesca Chair. [ONLINE] Available at: http://uk.steelclassic.com/marcel-breuer-cesca-chair.html. [Accessed 21 May 14].