In case you missed it earlier in the week, I wrote a lesson piece for Disegno magazine on Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair. You can see the post on their website here.
Images: Knoll
The Barcelona chair is in many ways the zenith of Mies van der Rohe’s European career. It’s up there with the greats: the Corbusier chaise longue, the Eames lounge chair, and the Arne Jacobsen Series 7 chair.
Even recently, the unmistakable form of Rohe’s Barcelona chair has been referenced in the form of Konstantin Grcic’s B bench, launched at IMM Cologne. But, although the Barcelona chair has had a huge legacy beyond the original Barcelona-based pavilion for which it was designed, it is still tied to its birthplace: a building that put Rohe’s name firmly on the map and raised his furniture design to public attention.
The Barcelona chair was originally designed for the German Pavilion at the International Exposition of 1929, hosted by Barcelona, Spain. Demolished at the end of the fair, the pavilion was reconstructed on the same site in 1986 by a group of Catalan architects who worked from photographs and salvaged drawings. Franz Schulze, Rohe’s biographer calls it, “[his] greatest single work” and describes the Barcelona chair as “the chair of the century”.
The design was in fact a collaboration, one between Rohe and his longtime partner, the Berlin-born architect and designer Lilly Reich. Reich was Rohe’s personal and professional partner for 13 years from 1925 until he emigrated to the USA in 1938. In 1930, when Rohe became head of the Bauhaus, Reich was appointed a master of furniture design.
Reich stands in the background of the Barcelona Chair’s story, with her achievements only recently coming to light. Only in 2010, when MoMa in New York presented a series of discussions about women who were artists at the time of the Bauhaus, was Reich properly recognised. Tellingly, Rohe had never designed furniture before he met Reich, and never created any further furniture designs after their partnership ended.
The German Pavilion was designed as “an ideal zone of tranquillity”, with a rich palette of materials and a free plan. Since there was no exhibition on display in the pavilion, the building itself became the exhibit. The Commissioner of the project, Georg von Schnitzler, said that the building should give “voice to the spirit of a new era” and represent Germany’s economic and political recovery from World War 1. Raised on a plinth of travertine – a form of limestone – the design of the pavilion was based on a formulaic grid system, with a flat roof supported by columns and movable internal walls made of glass and onyx.
Rohe could not have designed the Barcelona chair in isolation, without the concepts and story behind pavilion. Its design was a summation of Rohe’s belief that a piece of furniture was as important in the design of a building as the architecture. The chair was originally designed for the Spanish Royalty and German officials to oversee the inauguration of the exposition. Rohe set out to design an “important chair, a very elegant chair… the government was to receive a king… the chair had to be monumental… in those circumstances, you just couldn’t use a kitchen chair”.
The distinction between the supporting structure and the supported surfaces seen in the pavilion was also used in Rohe’s furniture inside, employing cantilevers and delicate structural frames to create a feeling of lightness and weightlessness. Initially, the distinctive cross-legged frame of the chair was designed to be bolted together, but by 1950 progressions in manufacture meant that it could be formed by a seamless piece of metal instead. Although the Barcelona chair appears machine-made, it was in originally largely handmade. The cushion pads were stitched from 148 separate pieces of ivory-coloured pigskin and the chromed stainless steel frame was handbuffed.
Despite only six Barcelona chairs being produced for the pavilion, the success of the chair withstood the demolition of the pavilion: it went into production in the 1930s. In 1953, six years after Lilly Reich’s death, Rohe sold his rights and his name on the design to the furniture manufacturer Knoll.
With Reich’s much-needed help, the design of furniture was an essential part of Rohe’s successful early European career, before he moved to the USA and started designing skyscrapers such as the Seagram Building. It is no coincidence that his two most famous buildings – the Barcelona pavilion and the Tugendhat House in Brno, Czechoslovakia – are also the locations that his two most famous chairs were designed for. The Brno chair became a design classic as well and was designed in collaboration with Lilly Reich in 1929/1930 for the bedroom of the Tugendhat House. Formed from a single piece of steel, it features the same clean lines of the Barcelona chair, bent into a C-shape to create a cantilever and support a leather upholstered seat.
Image: Knoll
Despite being designed for royalty, the Barcelona chair has moved from nobility into the homes of common man, just as the Bauhaus manifesto for rationality and functionality to which Rohe was aligned would have dictated. Although the Barcelona chair could not have been designed apart from the pavilion, the popularity of the design has meant that the chair has endured beyond its original purpose.
“A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous”, Rohe said in a February 1957 article in Time magazine about furniture designed by architects. It is probably why Mies van der Rohe is famous too. Rohe found the architecture the easy bit, but with Reich in tow, he found he could design furniture which was as popular as his buildings.
