The Wassily Chair looks like an architect's drawing in three dimensions: a few lines of steel, taut strips of leather, and empty space everywhere else. That emptiness is exactly what made it revolutionary.
The handlebar moment
Marcel Breuer was then head of the Bauhaus carpentry workshop in Dessau. He had just bought a bicycle and was struck by how light and strong its bent tubular-steel handlebars were. Why not bring this industrial technique to furniture? The B3, designed in 1925, was the first tubular-steel armchair in history.
The chair only took the name Wassily in the 1960s.
A club chair, X-rayed
Breuer kept the massive silhouette of the club chair — armrests, backrest, low seat — but removed all its bulk. What remains is the structure, the skeleton, and bands of canvas or leather that hold the body. The piece becomes transparent, light and suited to mass production.
Named after a friend
The chair owes its nickname to the painter Wassily Kandinsky, a Bauhaus master who admired it and owned one. When the Italian manufacturer Gavina reissued it in the 1960s, it gave the chair his name; Knoll, which took over Gavina in 1968, still produces it today.
Breuer imagined that one day we would sit on a resilient column of air: tubular steel was, to him, a step towards furniture disappearing altogether.
What it changed
After the B3, tubular steel swept through furniture: cantilever chairs by Mart Stam and Mies van der Rohe, armchairs by Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand. Almost a century later, the aesthetic of exposed structure, lightness and industrial production remains at the heart of contemporary design.
- Year: 1925
- Designer: Marcel Breuer
- Current manufacturer: Knoll
- Materials: chrome-plated tubular steel, leather or canvas
In a room, the Wassily works like a sculpture: it hides nothing of the space, it frames it. One is often enough to set the tone.
