Marcel Breuer’s Steel Tube Armchair

It was admired by faculty, students, and visitors at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where it was displayed in several apartments in the “Meister-Siedlung.” And as early as 1926, the year production began, it was hailed as a “masterpiece” at an exhibition in the Dresden Kunsthalle. Marcel Breuer’s first tubular steel armchair, the B 3—later known as the “Club Chair” or “ Wassily ”— immediately garnered widespread attention and played no small part in sparking the growing interest in the Bauhaus. Ultimately, it would trigger a global boom in tubular steel furniture, which came to symbolize avant-gardism and the intrusion of industrial aesthetics into the private sphere. With the equally novel black-and-silver contrast—which evokes both precious jewelry and modern machinery—he created a “magic of precision,” as a French critic wrote. Breuer saw his furniture as “apparatus of contemporary life.” They were meant to be lightweight, open, affordable, disassemblable, and hygienic. The B 3, which was also available in a folding version and which Breuer had designed in his spare time with the help of a metalworker, met these criteria. In doing so, he drew inspiration from the designs of Gerrit Rietveld, among others. With the Wassily chair, he did not, as he had hoped, create an everyday utilitarian object, but rather a new type of furniture and an “abstract-real sculpture” (Siegfried Geidion), whose open geometry embodies the minimalism of the new designers. It became the quintessential design icon, a central symbol of Modernism, and—not coincidentally—the first piece of furniture to be marketed as a “classic” in the 1960s. Incidentally, numerous myths surround the naming of the “ & ” Wassily & " chair. Some say it was named after Wassily Kandinsky was Marcel Breuer’s roommate at the Bauhaus. Others, however, claim it bears the name because the chair was a design for Wassily Kandinsky’s apartment at the Bauhaus in Dessau.