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    Barcelona® Chair Child's

    Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ca. 1929

    This product is currently unavailable.

    One of the most recognized objects of the last century has been scaled down for the next generation of design enthusiasts! The chair is built to the same standards as the original, so your kids can pass it down to their children.

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    Construction and Details
    • Upholstery available in a wide range of Spinneybeck® leathers
    • Upholstered with 40 individual panels. Individual panels are cut, hand-welted, and hand-tufted with leather buttons produced from a single cowhide. Cushions are premium quality, highly resilient urethane foam with down-like dacron polyester fiberfill
    • Upholstery straps are cowhide belting leather. Sides are dyed to match specified upholstery color. 13 straps are used for cushion support
    • The KnollStudio logo and signature of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe are stamped into the leg
    • Frame available in polished chrome, hand-ground and hand-buffed to a mirror finish, or premium grade 304 bar stock stainless steel shaped, welded and hand-buffed to a mirror finish.
    Sustainable Design and Environmental Certification
    • Barcelona® Chair - Childs is certified Clean Air GOLD
    • Learn more about Barcelona® Chair product certifications and materials at Ecomedes.

     

    Dimensions

    As a rising figure of the modernist movement, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was selected to design the German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona.

    Through masterful proportioning and planning, Mies created a rhythmic and entirely unprecedented space, which elevated industrial-age materials to a level of grace never before achieved. Inside, Mies included chairs and stools conceived as a resting place for the King and Queen of Spain. Determined to create a chair worthy of royalty, Mies is thought to have based the designs, with their signature crisscross frames, on the campaign chairs of Ancient Rome. Mies: “I feel that it must be possible to harmonize the old and new in our civilization.”

    Although the Barcelona Pavilion only stood for seven months, it is recognized as a defining achievement of modern architecture, as are the accompanying Barcelona Chairs (although the King and Queen reportedly never sat in them).

    Mies, a close friend and mentor to Florence Knoll during her time at the Illinois Institute of Technology, formally granted Knoll the production rights to the Barcelona Chair and Stool in 1953. The designs immediately became a signature of the Knoll brand and have been built to Mies van der Rohe’s exacting standards ever since.

     

    Regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s ‘less-is-more’ approach to design was the gold standard for many generations of modern architecture. His legendary career started humbly at his father’s stonemasonry business, giving him an early appreciation of material and structure. From there he apprenticed with furniture designer Bruno Paul in Berlin before joining the office of Peter Behrens, an architect and painter at the forefront of the modern movement.

    In 1912, Mies established his own office in Berlin. Through furniture, residential projects and extraordinary, yet unrealized concepts for skyscrapers, he gained recognition as a leader of the German modern movement. As such, he was selected to design the German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona.

    Mies served as Vice President of the Deutsher Werkbund and Director of the Bauhaus from 1930 until it closed in 1933. He immigrated to the United States in 1938 to become the director of architecture at the Armour Institute (later the Illinois Institute of Technology). From his Chicago-based practice, Mies designed a portfolio of buildings that changed the face of American institutional architecture ― the most notable examples being the IIT campus and the Seagram Building in New York.