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    Cesca Chair

    Marcel Breuer 1928

    Designed in 1928, Marcel Breuer’s Cesca chair married traditional craftsmanship with industrial methods and materials to help make tubular steel furniture an international sensation and a modern institution. The cantilevered form exploits the possibilities unique to the material and gives the chair added flexibility and comfort. Offered in arm and armless versions with a fully upholstered seat and back, or with hand-woven cane inserts.

    Finishes

    View Approved KnollTextiles

    • color Onyx Ultra Matte
    • color Dark Red Ultra Matte
    • color White Ultra Matte
    • color Chrome, Polished

    Dimensions

    Additional Info

    Construction and Details
    • Seat and Back: Hardwood beech with cane inserts, or molded plywood with foam cushion and leather or fabric upholstery. Can be specified with cane seat and back; upholstered seat and back; or cane seat with upholstered back.
    • Frame: Seamless 1" diameter tubular steel with polished chrome or ultra-matte powder-coated finish 
    • The 2024 introductions of ultra-matte dark red, onyx, and white reframe the iconic form of this Bauhaus-era chair
    • Available with or without arms
    • Plastic floor glides snap onto base to protect floors
    • An original Marcel Breuer design, the frame is stamped with the Knoll logo and designer’s signature, ensuring lifetime authentication. 
    Sustainable Design and Environmental Certification
    • Learn more about Cesca™ Chair product certifications and materials at Ecomedes.

    “At that time I was rather idealistic. 23 years old. I made friends with a young architect, and I bought my first bicycle. I learned to ride the bicycle and talked to this young fellow and told him that the bicycle seems to be a perfect production because it hasn’t changed in the last twenty, thirty years. It is still the original bicycle form. He said, ‘Did you ever see how they make those parts? How they bend those handlebars? You would be interested because they bend those steel tubes like macaroni.’ This somehow remained in my mind, and I started to think about steel tubes which are bent into frames—probably that is the material you could use for an elastic and transparent chair. Typically, I was very much engaged with the transparency of the form. That is how the first chair was made…I realized that the bending had to go further. It should only be bent with no points of welding on it so it could also be chromed in parts and put together. That is how the first Wassily was born.”

    After completing the Wassily, Breuer felt that the potential grace of the material was not yet fully exploited. The Wassily design was very much influenced by the constructivist theories of the Dutch De Stjil movement. A familiar form — in this case the classic club chair — reduced to its elemental lines and planes. The result was an overlapping, dense arrangement of leather and tubing. For the Cesca chairs Breuer sought to better celebrate the new material. An attempt to reduce visual noise led him to the continuous line of steel supporting a cantilevered seat — one of the most copied concepts in 20th century furniture.
     

     

    A champion of the modern movement and protégé of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer is equally celebrated for his achievements in architecture and furniture. Breuer was a student and subsequently a master carpenter at the Bauhaus in the early 1920s. His entire body of work, both architecture and furniture, embodies the driving Bauhaus objective to reconcile art and industry. While at the Bauhaus, Breuer revolutionized the modern interior with his tubular-steel furniture collection — inspired by bicycle construction and fabricated using the techniques of local plumbers. His first designs, including the Wassily, remain among the most identifiable icons of the modern furniture movement.

    While Breuer never worked directly for Knoll, he is nonetheless an influential figure in the company’s history. He was an early mentor to Florence Knoll during her time in the office of Walter Gropius in the 1930s. It was also Breuer who suggested that Hans Knoll hire Eszter Haraszty, the Knoll Textiles director responsible for many of the Knoll Planning Unit’s most memorable color combinations.

    Breuer eventually sold his furniture collection to the Italian design company Gavina SpA. In large part it was the Breuer Collection that motivated Knoll to acquire Gavina in 1968. Along with The Wassily Chair, the collection included the Cesca side chair and Laccio table collection — both modern classics in their own right.