
Episode 35
2003minutes.
Design - The Wassily Armchair
Synopsis
The Wassily Chair came out of the great crucible of art, design and theory that was the Bauhaus.
The Wassily Chair came out of the great crucible of art, design and theory that was the Bauhaus. Feininger, Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, Breuer, Albers and Bayer were among the famous artists who worked and taught at the Bauhaus. Like all great innovative movements in the history of ideas, Bauhaus attempted to bring theory and practice closer together and to rediscover connections between art and other human activities.
The Wassily Chair No. B3 was designed in 1925 by Marcel Breuer for Wassily Kandinsky's flat. Breuer was trying to create disconnected, aerial shapes which appeared to be sketched in space, but he also aimed to produce "styleless" objects which were essential to modern living.
The series of chairs begun with the Wassily were to revolutionise Western furniture. They were inspired by the handlebars of a bicycle, and used nickelled tubular steel for the first time in the history of furniture design. In 1928, at the same time as Gropius, Breuer left the Bauhaus in protest at the absence of architecture from its teaching programmes. He subsequently settled in Berlin, where he devoted himself to architecture, before leaving Germany for England and the USA.
The Wassily Chair and the statements it makes about form are astonishingly close to the theories set out by Kandinsky in his book Point and Line to Plane - or perhaps not so astonishingly, given that the chair was designed with Kandinsky in mind.
Available Versions
Audio
French, German, English
Subtitle
French
Transcription
None
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