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    Wassily Chair

    Marcel Breuer  1925

    Marcel Breuer ca. 1925

    Marcel Breuer was an apprentice at the Bauhaus when he conceived the world’s first tubular steel chair. Inspired by the frame of a bicycle, a product he greatly admired for its functional design, Breuer saw tubular steel as a way of building a more transparent chair. Influenced by the constructivist theories of the Dutch De Stjil movement, Breuer took a familiar form — in this case the classic club chair — and reduced it to its elemental lines and planes. The composition of leather strips suspended on steel tubes was the first chair of its kind. Breuer later named the chair after Wassily Kandinsky, the first person to whom he showed the chair.

    Dimensions

    Additional Info

    Construction and Details
    • Seat: Spinneybeck® belting leather with edges dyed to match; Spinneybeck thick cowhide leather; Spinneybeck haired hide; or natural canvas
    • Frame: Seamless 1" diameter tubular steel with polished chrome, polished 18K gold-plated, 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
    • Leather and fabric options are curated for their strength and premium feel
    • Four plastic floor glides snap into pre-drilled holes on chair base
    • An original Marcel Breuer design, the frame is stamped with the Knoll logo and designer signature, ensuring lifetime authentication
    Sustainable Design and Environmental Certification
    • Learn more about Wassily Chair product certifications and materials at Ecomedes.

    Configure Wassily Chair

    The configurator below is for reference purposes only. All options, finishes and sizes may not be represented.
    For the complete scope, please refer to the KnollStudio price list.


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    In an interview with a Knoll historian, Marcel Breuer described how he came to begin experimenting with bent tubular steel while at the Bauhaus:

    “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. I was myself somewhat afraid of criticism. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing these experiments actually. [Wassily] Kandinsky, who came by chance to my studio when the first chair was brought in, said, “What’s this?” He was very interested and then the Bauhaus got very interested in it. A year later, I had furnished the whole Bauhaus with this 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.