Financial Times Features Barcelona Chair in "Design Classic" Series

 The Financial Times featured the Barcelona Chair in its “Design classic” series on June 12, providing historical context for a piece that has become an icon of Mid-century luxury and style. In fact, as the Financial Times correctly indicates, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich designed the chair for the 1929 international exposition at the German Pavilion, also known as the Barcelona Pavilion.

The article situates the exposition within Germany's interests of the post-World War I period; Georg von Schnitzel, the pavilion commissioner, hired Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich to give “voice to the spirit of a new era.” The Barcelona Chair and the seminal architecture in which it sat set a tone of monumentality and material opulence. 

Knoll obtained the rights to the chair in 1948.

 

The Barcelona Pavilion, with Barcelona chairs and stools. Image courtesy The Architecture & Design Study Center, The Museum of Modern Art.