The Barcelona Chair

German-American architect, who was the leading and most influential exponent of the glass and steel architecture of the 20th-century International style.

Born in Aachen, Germany, on March 27, 1886, Mies received his principal training as an employee of the architect and furniture designer Bruno Paul (1874-1968) from 1905 to 1907 and then as an employee of the pioneering industrial architect Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1911. Mies opened his own office in Berlin in 1912. Mies received relatively few commissions during his early years, but his completed works illustrate the styles that were to occupy him throughout his career.

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In models for several skyscrapers, he experimented with steel frames and glass walls. In two early masterpieces, the German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona exhibition (for which he also designed the famous chrome and leather Barcelona chair) and the Tugendhat House (1930) in Brno, Czech Republic, he produced long, low glass-sheathed buildings in which the interiors were treated as a series of free-flowing spaces with minimal walls, usually of rare marbles and woods.

Mies's style was characterized by its severe simplicity and the refinement of its exposed structural elements. Although not the first architect to work in this mode, he carried rationalism and functionalism to their ultimate stage of development. His famous dictum "less is more" crystallized the basic philosophy of mid-20th-century architecture. Rigidly geometrical and devoid of ornamentation, his buildings depended for their effect on subtlety of proportion, elegance of material (including marble, onyx, chrome, and travertine), and precision of details. Mies was director of the Bauhaus School of Design, the major center of 20th-century architectural modernism, from 1930 until its disbandment in 1933. He moved to the U.S. in 1937, where, as director of architecture (1938-58) at the Illinois Institute of Technology, he trained a new generation of American architects. He produced many buildings in the U.S., including skyscrapers, museums, schools, and residences. His 37-story bronze-and-glass Seagram Building in New York City (1958; in collaboration with the American architect Philip Johnson) is considered the most subtle development of the glass-walled skyscraper, while his glass-walled Farnsworth House (1950, near Fox River, Ill.) is the culmination of his residential architecture. With the French architect Le Corbusier and the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies was one of the three most influential 20th-century architects, and his skyscraper designs in particular have been copied or adapted by most modern architects working in the field. He died in Chicago, Aug. 17, 1969.

Known as the "Barcelona Chair" today, it had originally been designed for the Deutscher Werkbund Pavilion at the Barcelona World Exposition in 1929. They were meant to be used by the King and Queen of Spain on occasion of their official visit to the exposition. The original version was covered with white pig leather. Though it has a "machine made" appearance it is almost 100% hand laboured. The frames are made of massive suspension steel. It requires extreme precision and higest craftsmanship to weld and finish the flawless joints. Left: Detail view of the luxurious upholstery, showing the beautiful grain of our leathers. Each single square is cut by hand and individually sewn. Such takes a lot of time... please allow us some extra weeks to do it properly. You will not regret it for many long years!

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

"The chair," said Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, "is a very difficult object. Everyone who has ever tried to make one knows that. There are endless possibilities and many problems--the chair has to be light, it has to be strong, it has to be comfortable. It is almost easier to build a skyscraper than a good chair."

Mies finds architecture and furniture design closely related; the problems, principles, and even the materials involved in building a skyscraper may also be found in the design of a chair. Architecture, in fact, led Mies to his interest in furniture design. "People asked for furniture to go with our buildings," he explains. "They thought they wanted a chair that someone else didn't have."

In 1929, Mies was commissioned by the German government to design the German pavilion for the Barcelona Fair, one of the most elegant pieces of architecture ever created and the classic example of a structure using continuous spatial flow. This building required furniture that simply did not exist, so Mies responded to this commission with the Barcelona chair.

It had to be an "important chair, a very elegant chair," said Mies. "The government was to receive a king, a dictator, an ambassador. This was not a private affair, this was a government building. The chair had to be important, it had to seem elegant and costly, it had to be monumental. In those circumstances, you just couldn't use a kitchen chair."

To achieve this sense of luxury, Mies used size and such materials as the finest kid leather for the cushions. In one sense, however, the Barcelona chair's combination of steel, webbing, and leather was a failure. "My idea," says Mies, "was to use the elasticity of steel. The chair was to open up for its occupant under the weight of his body. The back was to go back, the seat go down. But when we tried the chair in steel, there was no spring. It was too rigid to respond to the demands of the design." But although the chrome-plated steel frame had no give, it served well as a skeleton for the leather cushions.

The chair, now manufactured in the United States and 29 countries by Knoll Associates, represents the highest achievement in coordination of materials, craftsmanship, and design. Mies refined his original design in 1950 to take advantage of advancements in the formulation of stainless steel, and the result is a completely welded, one-piece stainless steel frame of superior spring, strength, and beauty. The unbroken flow of line is made possible by the integral strength of a special steel alloy, which eliminated the need for additional braces at welding points. The frame is polished by hand to a flawless mirror finish.

The production model of the Barcelona chair is upholstered only in top-grain natural leathers, tan or black in color. The seat and back cushions are formed from forty separately cut panels, joined by narrow handsewn welts. Of foam rubber, the cushions are supported by straps of saddle leather. Despite its luxury price of nearly $1,000, the chair has shown a steady increase in production and sales. The numbers sold in 1960, for example, was almost triple that for 1956.

It is considered sacrilegious to criticize Mies, who is considered the world's foremost architect, but a note of caution might be sounded regarding the Barcelona chair, like many of Mies' architectural achievements. Curiously, Mies, who espouses the moduIar look, mass production, and advanced technology, often produces designs that demand the ultimate in hand craftsmanship. This chair is one example and the price reflects this problem. But the chair is what Mies set out to make it, a status symbol in the modern idiom. The chair's ingenious visual design operates as pure sculpture, and it is widely used in lobbies, along with a couple of rubber plants, to fill an otherwise barren space effectively. It is possible though that the Barcelona chair is, like much of Mies' work, the final word in chair design for this century.

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