The Barcelona Chair: Modern Furniture Design by Mies van der Rohe

Even if nearly all people normally ascribe it to furnishings done during the “modern age”, current furniture is in fact a name designating furniture affect by modernism. This class in furniture first developed in the late 19th century, unhurriedly overshadoweding traditional furniture design and shortly becoming a leading style of its own. And one of the most iconic pattern of modern furniture is the Barcelona Chair by Mies van der Rohe.

Believed as to be a flagship propose of the Bauhaus design movement, the Barcelona Chair was made by German designer Ludwig Mies van der ROhe in partnership with Lilly Reich in 1929. The chair was done by Mies van der Rohe for the Pabellón Alemán, which he alsofinished, in Barcelona, Spain. The chair, as well as the Pabellón it was housed in, was Germany’s official entry to the celebrated 1929 Ibero-American Exposition and was destined to showcase Germany’s cultural resuscitation and industrial viability.

As with all of Mies van der Rohe’s current forms, the Barcelona Chair was light in construction and utilize the simple of materials. The X-shaped frame, said to be encouraged by the shape of earliest Egyptian folding chairs and campaign stools, was completed from slim industrial-strength steel coated with chrome. The chrome, still, was eventually changed with stainless steel as the latter facilitated the frame to be created from into single seamless piece. The frame is topped with a pair of square cushions wraped with soft ivory-colored pigskin, but like the chrome-plated frame it too was later changed with black cow leather. Later copy of the design, though, have also been fitted with other kind of upholstery in various colors.

The Barcelona Chair was first fashioned in the 1930s in Europe and the US but was stopped in the 1950s when the patents for the design’s elements finish. Then in 1953 the rights to the Barcelona Chair was attain by Knoll, a company specializing in high-end designer furniture, and these days remains the sole official manufacturer of the design.