Wassily™ Chair

Knoll

Designed by Marcel Breuer

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.